ISP around me had policies like “we can provide Usenet except for the binaries trees”

I see zero subscribers, zero posts. I’m not breaking that streak

If I must

Although dictionaries will show words that significant parts of the population say are wrong, I’m still going to say octopuses is also correct because octopus is an English word and English usually pluralises like that

Octopusen is not common since octopus is too new to get that style of English plural

Of course significant parts of the population spell “than” with an e, or “then” with an a, and/or don’t know the difference between it’s and its

Would you care to pluralise octagon?

There are workflows using LLMs that seem fair to me, for example

• using an LLM to produce a draft, then
• Editing and correcting the LLM draft
• Finding real references and replacing the hallucinated ones
• Correcting LLM style to your style

That seems like more work than doing it properly, but it avoids some of the sticking points of the proper process

LLMs can’t cite. They don’t know what a citation is other than a collection of text of a specific style

You’d be lucky if the number of references equalled the number of referenced items even if you were lucky enough to get real sources out of an LLM

If the student is clever enough to remove the trap reference, the fact that the other references won’t be in the University library should be enough to sink the paper

Legal eagle has a video spelling out which laws are broken. Note that there are specific laws against paying people to vote

Use a throwaway email, drop it as soon as the promotion is over

I can’t say I have ever considered myselfgender fluid due to my gender perfectly fitting the shape of its container (ie me)

That’s “parent” not “adult”

I with no kids at home have excellent sleep

Teens are the ones (after new mothers) who suffer the most, with natural sleep cycles starting around midnight or in the early morning and wake times in the late morning or early afternoon, but school schedules that force them to be active at school from 9am

My sister got told off regularly for reading after lights out

As adults my mother told me that after they found books for me I liked they pretended to never notice the light leaking through my doona, they were just happy to see I was reading

It’s not like the US manufacturers anything anymore, and Hollywood has forgotten how to make movies

It’s like you don’t even try to export your culture anymore, when I was a kid everyone watched Sesame Street, now all the kids in all the English speaking world are watching Bluey

Yeah public transport is ideal for most transport cases and should be funded by cities to the level to allow it to provide that

But still some cases call for individual transport and my preference on that is taxis over Uber and the like as taxis have a duty to pick up anyone who can pay which the newer companies don’t

I hope that self driving taxis include accessible ones, I expect there will still need to be a class of staffed cars to help people who need assistance - eg those who can’t lift their bag into our out of the vehicle, those who need assistance to put on a seat belt

Thanks, I’m not great on biblical history, so corrections and detail are welcome

Mine are grass finished, and watered with rain - the most environmentally friendly meat available. I expect the cheap meat in Texas is grain finished, which makes each animal fatter and heavier and cheaper per unit weight

I got server space pretty cheap recently. There’s a lot of competition in that space and they compete on price as well as quality

So whatever performance level you need doesn’t cost a lot more than the fraction of hardware lifetime you’re buying

“Harder” depends on what services you’re offering. Email is hard now; web is no harder (though web sites are as hard as you want them to be), hosting a game server is as easy as it ever has been

And that cost of labor

I buy a fair bit of meat. At my nearest butcher scotch fillet steak (rib eye, I think, in American English) is $35 per kilo. It is from a meat packing plant with reasonably cheap labor, with expensive equipment amortized over thousands of cattle a year, cutting up cows all day

At my next nearest butcher it’s $60/kg. It’s cut off a cow carcass hanging in the back of the shop by a butcher with a knife

On the good side there are few middle men in meat

We are more efficient. In my work computer automation has saved the equivalent to five thousand workers

Those five thousand workers don’t get to work a fraction of a day for the same pay, the saving is made a level or five above the workers

Some of our savings are hidden by inflation, but many products are far cheaper now

I have lots of books in paper. I have dozens electronically

The paper ones are good. I can lend them to friends, smell them, have them looking good on a shelf, can read while I’m doing something else on my phone

The electronic ones are with me. I can read them when I find myself surprisingly with nothing better to do.

That assumes the work of creating or collating the information has been fully amortized. The cost of information should tend toward zero, but it should start high enough to fairly reward its creators and those who made it visible