This is basically how we ended up with the burqa. A woman’s body is evil because it makes men unable to control their sexual urges, therefore women must be banned. Now, in Afghanistan, a woman’s voice must not even be heard.

How long until the USA reaches that point?

Duolingo got me enough vocabulary in Spanish to put the simplest sentences together, and then follow more robust lessons. I still think it was a good starting point, but I won’t use it anymore on principle.

As bad as American prisons are, they are not on the scale as being deported (is that even the right word in this case?) to what amounts to a concentration camp in a foreign country without any process.

A little over a year ago, a guy tried to ask me out and I’m the process said a few dumb things in an attempt to impress me. The dumbest of them all was that he was planning to buy a Cybertruck as his next vehicle. By the time he’d said this, I’d already long made up my mind about this guy. Mind, this was the period of time when Elon was just an asshole and hadn’t gone full Nazi yet, but even then, this dude’s choice of vehicle told me I’d made the right choice.

Theseadays I wonder if that guy ever got his idiot truck, and, whether he did or not, if he’s changed his mind about it.

Librarians go to school to learn how to manage information, whether it is in book format or otherwise. (We tend to think of libraries as places with books because, for so much of human history, that’s how information was stored.)

They are not supposed to have more information in their heads, they are supposed to know how to find (source) information, catalogue and categorize it, identify good information from bad information, good information sources from bad ones, and teach others how to do so as well.

I had to tell a bunch of librarians that LLMs are literally language models made to mimic language patterns, and are not made to be factually correct. They understood it when I put it that way, but librarians are supposed to be “information professionals”. If they, as a slightly better trained subset of the general public, don’t know that, the general public has no hope of knowing that.

Dogs taking away jobs from humans? What a disgrace! Surely dogs are DEI hires, if I ever saw one. They’re not even people!

There are very many normal human sounds that are not speech, including, but not limited to: laughter, crying, yelling/screaming/yelping (in surprise, pain, fear), groaning, moaning, yawning, sneezing, coughing, vomiting, singing, whistling.

What constitutes human speech? There are languages that have sounds that don’t exist in other languages (said as someone still trying to get a hold on rolling my Rs).

In any case, we should all learn some sign language. Seriously, it’s useful to be able to communicate silently or just visually (e.g. Across a noisy room), plus it makes life way more inclusive for Deaf people.

DEI can still be achieved without using that terminology directly.

I agree that not longer having a policy or metrics around diversity doesn’t mean that the people in a company won’t still value it. I’m a part-time student and the school’s director recently did an AMA. He said an upcoming event was renamed to avoid the threats that are being directed at “DEI”, but the event itself is still about cultural diversity. I forget what the new name was, something about the stories of our people or something like that.

The best use, for me, is asking ChatGPT to give me five (or however many) scholarly, peer-reviewed articles on a topic. Then I search for said articles by title and author name on my school library database.

It saves me so much time compared to doing a keyword search on said same database and reading a ton of abstracts to find a few articles. I can get to actually reading them and working on my assignment way faster.

AI is a great tool for people who use it properly.

I don’t understand what you mean by Firefox’s development is driven by the community? It’s not a community contributed open source software; my friend worka on Firefox and is a Mozilla employee.

I’ve been waiting five years for Ruthie!

The movie ended up being what I expected from the trailer: a disappointment. This should have been a movie just about Georgiou, and a movie about Section 32 should have been something else a entirely.

The Hunger Games concept was kind of dumb, but I actually liked the San story. It gives Georgiou more depth and complexity, but it could have been a lot more. Unfortunately, it was just sandwiched in between an action-whodunnit with a lot of new characters (who were not adequately developed on their own rights) instead of being a drama with some action scenes, as a story like it should have been.

I love Michelle Yeoh, and I’ll watch her in anything, but this was a poorly written and directed movie that didn’t know what it should have been.

Trip was a complete gentleman… that time. He made no guarantees or warranties for future missions.

The showrunners said from a very early point that the two would not get together during the shows run

I had missed this. I’d hung five season’s worth of ship-hope on them, but I regret nothing because they’re adorable and they had better get together in the comics!!!

This makes this season’s Rutherford make a lot more sense. I am definitely a Rutherford-Tendí shipper, but even my friend who is significantly less so of one than me noticed that the two of them seemed to barely interact after she returned from Orion. They didn’t have a lot of screen time, but even the screen time they did have was more being in the same scene together than interacting together which seemed so unlike them. But I thought the whole Tendi-T’Lyn rivalry was very unlike Tendi, too.

I am very displeased that they left the Rutherford and Tendi relationship hanging.

Thank you so much for taking the time and effort to answer my question and helping me understand this (or at least understand it better). The world is fascinating!

I have a question with my very limited knowledge of biology:

Currently, pathogens “use” certain resources in a host, and then the host’s immune system creates antibodies that eventually kill the pathogens (or the pathogen kills the host).

The arguments are: mirror pathogens would require mirror antibodies, which is not possible for natural bodies to produce. However, this is not really a problem because our physical selves as resources would be incompatible with the needs of a mirror pathogen.

My question is: mirror or otherwise, could a pathogen “hijack” something other than usual as a resource?

Let’s say, I don’t know, Prime Pathogen A normally uses Prime Protein A, Mirror Pathogen A would require Mirror Pathogen A. Is it possible for a host to have a Prime Protein B that meets Mirror Pathogen A’s requirement–perhaps not perfectly, but “good enough” to sustain Mirror Pathogen A?

School shootings are just a matter of course now, they’re not even newsworthy anymore unless there’s an Uvalde-level of utter incompetence involved. And even then, what happened? Nothing, nothing happened to the cowards who were complicit and accomplices to the murder of children by actively preventing people from around the killer. We’re told to get over it.

So, you know, if I had to choose between school children being murdered as a matter of course and evil profiteers who revel and flourish on the pain and suffering of everyday people being murdered as a matter of course, I’d definitely chose the latter. I wouldn’t then tell people to get over it, I’d tell people the system obviously need to be dismantled and rebuilt entirely.

My real preference would be that there are no evil profiteers who revel and flourish on the pain and suffering and that systems be functioning for the people in the first place, but unfortunately that’s not an option.