A lot of these replies are framing it as meeting someone out in the wild, but that’s not how most modern dating works. So, another reason why the pool is limited is that s lot of celebrities these days are on the dating app Raya.

There’s a strict application process where you have to demonstrate that you’re financially successful, physically attractive, and in some way notable. It started off exclusively as celebrities but now you can also get in if you’re, say, a c-suite executive at a large firm or own your own high-value tech firm. You also pretty much have to live in LA or New York if you want to match with anybody.

There are all kinds of rules, too. You’ll get banned for like if you take a screenshot in the app or publicly identify someone that you know is on the app. You’ll even get banned for publicly mentioning that the app exists too often.

Because of that it’s difficult to confirm who is on it, but it’s rumoured to be incredibly popular amongst celebrities. Keirnan Shipka in an interview once declared herself to be “Raya for life”.

These days most people meet people through dating apps. And the app that most celebrities are on is deliberately very exclusive, to the point where a middle-class person absolutely would not be allowed on it.

Rand was married to Frank O’Conner for 50 years, and he spoke about his deep love and devotion for her. She also had a lover, Nathanial Branden, for 14 years (with Frank’s knowledge and permission) who also spoke about his love and passion for her.

She was a horrible person with a repulsive, nonsensical philosophy, but she did have people who loved her.

She was a fascinating person, and if you’re genuinely interested in learning more about her, I recommend the installment about her of the podcast Origin Story, which you can find on this page: https://www.podmasters.co.uk/origin-story or, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts. It’s very well-researched and informative (one advantage of being a podcast written and presented by actual seasoned journalists), while also being told with a light, funny touch.

The exact mechanics are never explained, but I’ve always loved “fenestering” in David Zindell’s Neverwhere and Requiem For Homo Sapiens trilogy.

A pilot, in a one-person “lightship”, interfaces with their computer, merging their minds into one. They then solve maths equations which have never been solved before and prove new mathematical theories. This opens up a window underneath the ship, which it falls in to, into hyperspace. They then need to do more novel maths to open up the window to where they’re going and fall through that.

It’s weird and it’s nerdy and it’s poetic and it’s mystical, like everything in the books, and it’s just so incredibly cool.

Un-Named-Tomato-Y-Thing-With-Mince-Pasta-And-Pesto-ius

It’s always wild when characters in the public perception are very different to in the source material.

Jeckyll & Hyde is another example. Jeckyll is a doctor who drinks a potion which changes his personality into a ruffian. Except he’s not, at least in the original short story.

Jeckyll is always in control and aware of what he’s doing. All the potion does is change his appearance so that he can do the bad things that he’s been doing since he was young without losing his social standing.

The whole point of the story is that his personality doesn’t change at all and that he’s just donning a disguise (albeit a sci-fi disguise) so that he can get away with it without losing his day job.

Yet in every adaptation is basically treated as a werewolf story.

That’s Roku’s Basilisk

On a course i was once given the statistic that at 30mph 90% of pedestrians die, and at 20mph 90% live.

Now consider (from the same course) that breaking isn’t linear and most stopping happens at the end. So if you’re going 30 and would stop at point x during an emergency stop, then if you start an emergency stop at the same point while doing 40 you’ll reach point x doing 30.

Yeah. I don’t speed, especially in areas with pedestrians.

Outer Wilds. Easily the most profoundly moving experience I’ve ever had from playing a video game. And it does such a good job of starting off - and even remaining, to a degree - a fun, light-hearted story.

If there’s anybody reading this who’s interested in the game, let me say a couple of things.

1. Go in as spoiler-free as possible. The entire progression system is based on acquiring knowledge, and a lot of the power of the game comes from discovering everything for yourself, in your own way.

2. Don’t treat it like a game. Instead put yourselves in the shoes of your character. See something that you think looks cool? Go and look at it. Don’t think “well, I should probably finish this area first…” Explore. Learn. Decide for yourself what your priority is.

Loads of games call themselves open world, but are actually quite on rails. One trigger at the beginning of the game aside, Outer Wilds really is open world. One reason why watching other people play it is so much fun is that everybody really does have a completely different experience while playing it. One person will do something as the first thing they do, then someone else will do the same thing when they’re 80% of the way through. And the game is so well-designed that both ways is equally rewarding.

Sorry, I tend to evangelise for this game a lot because it is, as I said above, a genuinely profound and moving experience.

Even the defence is bullshit. The „Roman salute“ was invented for a film and almost immediately adopted by Italian fascists. The Nazis copied it from them.

So, it is a „Roman Salute“. Because that‘s exactly the same thing as a Nazi salute.

Maybe he means that he admires Mussolini more than Hitler?

Thank you

They‘re probably okay with the price because the number of private users will dwarf the commercial users.

As for businesses shutting it down - any business which is using it has already bought the hype. They‘re not using it because it‘s actually effective. They‘re much more likely to crack down on workers than they are to ban AI all together.

I do agree that it won‘t work out in the end, not because this particular strategy is stupid, but because the products don‘t work and no strategy could work.

And there‘s still no compelling use-case for the average consumer. Coders and scientists? Can be. But most people don‘t really have a use for it in most situations, even in business contexts. It‘s mostly a solution in search of a problem, and even then it‘s so unreliable that even things trying to sell you it as a solution have to add the disclaimer that you shouldn‘t use it for anything that‘s remotely important.

So even if the costs were markedly less than they are, there‘s still no real path to profitability because there‘s no real call for it.

The only use I‘ve found as a consumer is using something like Perplexity as a search engine. And that‘s not a testament to how good Perplexity is, but instead a testament to how bad other search engines have become. Perplexity just avoids things like SEO and is mostly quite good at finding sources which aren‘t themselves AI-generated.

And…I really see a near future in which AI-SEO becomes a thing and Perplexity et. al. become just as useless as google.

You can operate without a local account - source, I‘m on Windows 11 and I‘ve never had a Microsoft account - but it‘s a massive PITA and takes a lot of playing around and disconnecting from the internet during install, and stuff like that.

You‘re right that 99% of people won‘t know/won‘t bother to go through the hassle and that Microsoft through the years have been making it harder and harder to have a local account, but at the moment it‘s still technically possible.

The channel‘s called Some More News

The issue there is that even at that pricepoint, Microsoft is still operating CoPilot at a loss. If they drop it more, they’ll be making even more of a loss. Which is the standard business model for new products these days, but the losses on AI products dwarf things like Netflix and Uber during their “operate at a loss to drive everybody else out of business” phase.

Of course, that would all be fine if CoPilot was some killer product that people quickly found themselves unable to work without. Instead, the feedback shows that workers find that it’s not useful or reliable enough to be worth using, and Microsoft’s own latest advert for CoPilot in Excel contains data which shows that at best operation it doesn’t work 46% of the time, and that figure can be as high as 80%.

I’m not sure these problems are really surmountable - you’ve got an incredibly expensive-to-run product which doesn’t do much that’s useful and is bad at the things that it actually could be useful for. It’s not just Microsoft, it’s the entire tech industry that’s facing this problem.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was a sham.

The broader point, though, is that the scenario of The Lord of the Flies has actually happened. We’ve had a small group of kids trapped on an island for an extended period of time and what happened is that they built a peaceful and harmonious society, which included spending time and resources caring for one of their number who broke their leg.