Let’s hope that new identity has an excellent credit score and little to no criminal history!

Used to be a program on the tv set called Lizard Lick Towing. Never watched it, myself, but now I’m kind of glad I missed it. So, thank you for that CERN. Money well spent.

Why ask why? Eins, zwei, drei.

I said what, what kitty butt. I said what, what kitty butt.

On the one hand, I loathe feeling that way sometimes. On the other hand, for the better part of the past decade+ any criticism I had about Amazon was met with victim blaming white knight replies and basically no support. At best I’m probably more on the ambivalent side of things than the no sympathy side, not that there’s effectively much difference.

Don’t judge me. I hate needles and if eating a lizard will tip the scales in my favor, it’s their own damned fault for being delicious, nutritious, and apparently immunicious. It’s a word. I just made it up, though.

Some of us lacked fully formed adult brains when we were kids and so we sometimes did stupid shit that humans with more fully developed and advanced brains wouldn’t. Also, times were different decades ago. There was a time when we didn’t have things like dish detergent with peroxide or tide with oxy clean, so sometimes we’d just add a drop of detergent to some peroxide to help it penetrate into fabric and better remove a blood stain or things like that.

That aside, “cleaning better” is hardly the only rationale for why I’ll sometimes whip together a DIY cleaning product. I’m guessing I’m not alone in that. So I think focusing on that one rationale might be missing the bigger picture for peoples’ motivations.

Isn’t chloroform a known human carcinogen?

I’ve accidentally mixed those two ingredients together, very stupidly in my younger years, for misguided cleaning purposes and whatever that reaction is, it’s nothing like ammonia and bleach, but it still set off my spidey senses enough to know I needed to get out of the area and never do it again.

Probably Coca-cola and its legal teams have some degree of responsibility for the minimal polar bear association.

Am I missing something? A few penguin references / associations with Christmas, sure I’ve seen that. But, at least in my part of the world, they’re not a major part of the lore – or am I having a moment?

Either way, this can be easily explained: It’s called being inclusive. The last thing you want is a north pole versus south pole world wide Christmas turf war, best to extend an olive branch andlean into that diversity and inclusion metric for the good of the world’s children and the fate of humanity.

It’s very complicated to define and measure something as nebulous, nuanced, and politically charged as unemployment in a precise, meaningful, objective, and cost-effective way (amongst other vital characteristics).

In the USA, we’re measuring and defining unemployment with methodologies that are essentially the lowest common denominator. That these numbers also obscure and obfuscate the reality of the situation is part of the design. To further complicate the issue, a lot of policies are being made essentially to game those simplified metrics – perverse incentives.

These numbers may very well be extremely precise and highly accurate and still it doesn’t mean that they are reflective of what Americans are experiencing as a whole or on an individual basis. And yet, policy makers are (or appear to be) focusing on these singularly to make them look better and keep up appearances.

My situation and experience are completely anecdotal, of course, but from my vantage point, it looks like there’s an uncontrolled downward economic spiral being swept under the rug. Folks who can work and want to work (or at least wouldn’t mind it) are sitting outside the system, idle. Employers are reducing their workforce and then placing added burden on those that remain to make up the difference. Those folks are burning out, taking leave, quitting, retiring early, etc. Employers aren’t replacing them, just slathering the work onto fewer and fewer plates. So, if the government isn’t doing anything meaningful about it (and in fact making it worse) and employers aren’t doing anything meaningful about it (besides taking advantage), it’ll be interesting to see how this is resolved. “It’ll work itself out in a few years” is not a reasonable stance, whether it’s true or not.

Unemployment numbers that aren’t as bad as everyone expected are missing the point, and certainly not a cause to rally and celebrate, in my opinion.

Where I live, the definition of a bug is super liberal to the point of absurdity.

But even that’s been topped a few times over the years. When I used to be active on Reddit, I would participate in the “bug” identification sub. It wasn’t frequent, but it also wasn’t all the uncommon for folks to show up asking for ID on reptiles and amphibians, even remember that a shrew (or maybe it was some other small mammal) was posted once.

It wasn’t that big of a surprise for me. I used to work retail decades ago and I remember a customer who returned a bag of salad greens because there was a bug in it. The “bug” was a very small baby frog (just out of tadpole stage) – likely some kind of tree frog.

I don’t know the exact species involved here, but if I had a penny, I’d bet the two individuals on the left are mom and dad while the third individual that looks like it is wildly gesturing is probably a juvenile begging its parent to feed it.

In my part of the world, you see this kind of behavior in many different bird species. In some species, the juveniles appear to be larger than the parents and yet will still beg for food.

And then there are actual good developers who could or would tell you that LLMs can be useful for coding, in the right context and if used intelligently. No harm, for example, in having LLMs build out some of your more mundane code like unit/integration tests, have it help you update your deployment pipeline, generate boilerplate code that’s not already covered by your framework, etc. That it’s not able to completely write 100% of your codebase perfectly from the get-go does not mean it’s entirely useless.