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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Was doing some woodworking with the big power tools my dad had set up in the basement. First time using the table saw, I start my cut and realize the blade wasn’t high enough and wasn’t cutting through the whole piece of wood. I knew that I couldn’t let go of the wood while the machine was running, or it would become a projectile.

    So I turned it off and immediately let it go, turning it into a projectile because the blade was still spinning. Luckily it only caught the back of my finger, though it left a scar.




  • No, you must go back and tell him that the moon moves at a very predictable rate and once you get close enough it will even pull you in.

    Also I’m pretty sure the ISS moves a lot faster than the moon but we still manage to dock spacecraft with it. I’m pretty sure it’s a bit smaller than the moon and docking can require higher precision than landing on a surface. Even Boeing managed to do it.


  • Though even in that case, I’d consider water consumed to be covered under “food”.

    The only exceptions I can think of are from gaining mass from things other than what you eat. Like tar buildup from smoking, snorting or injecting various substances, boffing something (I think that’s what it’s called… Up the butt instead of out the butt), things sticking to your skin, absorbing through the skin, or bugs/aliens laying eggs inside you. Maybe getting possessed by a ghost, if ghosts have mass. But I don’t think all of those combined would even come close to a single meal, other than extreme cases.

    I was curious and looked into how much mass the average adult loses through breathing, and apparently it’s at least about 69g (at rest, if you are metabolizing fat).



  • That’s pretty smart, using it for legal documents. If the accuracy is high, it might be nice to just copy paste any tos or whatever to get the highlights in plain language (which imo should be a legal requirement of contracts in general, but especially ones written by a team of bad faith lawyers intended for people they don’t expect to read it and deliberately written to discourage reading the whole thing).




  • This could be intended to settle a disagreement between management people who don’t see the trend of gamers finally getting fed up with the bullshit and others who don’t call the shots but do have a finger on the pulse (or even feel that way themselves and know they aren’t alone).

    I’d bet good money there’s plenty of developers and other gamers involved with a bunch of these companies watching decisions being made with horror.

    Actually I bet management only allowed this to be a poll because they did notice the trend of gamers getting fed up and previous cash cows running dry, but they needed a poll because they don’t want to believe that the thing they thought was the best way to fight piracy was hated by people who would otherwise be happy to spend money on it.

    I always keep thinking back to a piece of software that took weeks to get running at a job where we were development partners and then when I decided I wanted to use it with a personal project at home, I had a pirated copy running within hours. All the DRM stuff just made it into a pain for legit users while those using pirated copies never even saw that after it was cracked.

    And denuvo doesn’t even stop sucking once you get it running the first time, it will be wasting CPU cycles and memory bandwidth until the publisher decides it’s not worth paying the license fee for anymore.



  • I was only in SF for one day and had an event most of that day, unfortunately, so I didn’t get to see much of the city. I think I saw the golden gate bridge from the plane. The hotel they put me in was nice, though, most comfortable bed I’ve ever slept in.

    LA was hot and the traffic was pretty crazy. I was there for about a week for siggraph with work. Santa Monica was nice, it was cool seeing the Hollywood sign in person, and I do remember looking back at the city and seeing all the haze.

    Six flags had rollercoasters that lasted longer than the longest one at Canada’s Wonderland (at least at the time, their 3 newest ones are a bit more comparable). I won a giant Scooby Doo stuffy because they had a game where I figured out the trick to it on my first play and returned later to upgrade my small Scooby-Doo to the large one (and bought the bag for the plane trip). The stuffy was pretty cheaply made though, so they might have still made money from the two plays I paid for lol.

    Other bits and pieces I remember are the different vegetation they had (my first time seeing palm trees) and noticing the barbed wire on a bunch of flat roofs. Also it was weird to see commercials for prescription drugs.

    Oh yeah, I almost forgot one of the highlights of the trip, going to Fry’s during it’s heyday. I was buying my own hardware at that time but it was the first time I saw an aisle of motherboards where you could actually see the boards on display. I think we ended up going there twice, once for cables we forgot to pack for our booth, then later for our own shopping trip.








  • Could consider the AI itself to be art, any by extension anything it produces is a part of that art.

    Though, combined with the other commenter’s point about it involving work from the prompter as well (or “work” tbf, since not all AI output requires tweaking if you get lucky), makes me wonder.

    If someone creates a tool that is a work of art and another person uses that tool to create another work of art, how much of that 2nd work belongs to the 2nd artist and how much belongs to the tool maker?

    Same thing with skills and technique. I got better at doing random landscape paintings after watching Bob Ross do it. I applied the techniques but might have never known them in the first place if not for Bob. How much of that art is mine vs Bob’s?

    Not saying AI is entirely equivalent to these scenarios or that anything should change based on the answers to the questions. They are mostly philosophical and interesting to consider IMO.

    I wish we had UBI so that this whole topic wasn’t so existential for people who depend on selling art to survive (which was difficult even before generative AI was a thing).


  • Catholic masses are extremely cult-like. There’s a choreographed stand/sit/kneel dance, “everybody please give us money” phase, plus a part where everyone lines up to eat their unappetizing snack.

    And they speed kids through the initiation process so that they are “committed” before high school, when they might start thinking for themselves.

    I don’t understand how anyone can look at that religion and not immediately see that it’s mostly a power grab dressed up as a salvation from inherited sins that were made up in the first place. And then later, it’s, “Hey yeah, you’ll get into heaven, just tell us all the dirt on you!”