I use Excel at work, not in a traditional accounting sense, but my company uses it as an interface with one of our systems I frequently work with.

Rather than tediously search the main Excel sheets that get fed into that system for all of the data fields I have to fill in, I made separate Excel tools that consolidate all of that data, then use macros to put the data into the correct fields on the main sheets for me.

Occasionally I’ll have to add new functionality to that sheet, so I’ll ask AI to write the macro code that does what I need it to do.

Saves me from having to learn obscure VBA programming to perform a function that I do during .0001% of my work time, but that’s about the extent of it. For now.

Of course most of what I do is white collar computer work, so I’m expecting that my current job likely has a two-year-or-less countdown on it before they decide to use AI to replace me.

The classics never die.

Of all the things that AI has spit out, this certainly is one of them.

Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

To be fair, I think you were expecting something from it that isn’t part of its core.

I don’t play it myself, but I have several friends and family that do, and they all cite it as their comfy, repetitive (by design) game that they play for a half hour at the end of a day to unwind and shut their brain off. From what I can tell, THAT seems to be the goal of the game, and it sounded like you wanted the opposite from it.

I use a bunch of YouTube enhancing extensions.

SponsorBlock. so very, very good. First user into a video after it drops, who has this extension, marks the portion of it that is the YouTuber’s ad read / sponsor segment. Extension auto-skips it for every user who watches after. Saves a lot of time.

Multiselect for YouTube. Just what it sounds like, you can select multiple videos at once to add or delete from playlists, instead of doing them one at a time.

PlayerTube. Use approximations of player UIs from bygone years. I’m partial to 2013 myself.

Return YouTube Dislike and YouTube Shorts Block. Self explanatory from titles.

Others (non-YT) I use…

Change Case. I watch my keyboard and not my screen whilst typing, and this just lets me quickly flip large chunks of unnoticed caps-lock text back to normal once I discover it, rather than having to retype it all.

Simple Translate. Quickly run highlighted text through a translator on the right click menu.

Multiplayer co-op FPSes, on the other hand, are freaking fantastic. There’s a reason why my friend group gaming rotation is primarily composed of Deep Rock Galactic, Left 4 Dead 2, and Vermintide / Darktide.

It depends on what you mean by viewpoint. If they’re disagreeing about objective reality, 0/10. If we can’t agree on an objective level, there’s no point.

This is pretty much the crux of the problem right here. How are you supposed to have any kind of productive conversation about the world if they are living in a fictional one that doesn’t actually exist?

Is it possible to find a girl at the festival?

I’m going to say probably, considering that approximately 50% of the human population is female, give or take a smidge.

I don’t enjoy my current three days a week in the open office, but I’ve found that noise blocking headphones and running podcasts and YouTube videos as background noise just makes it all, for the most part, go away.

You don’t even have to go expensive with them to pull this off. I bought these off of Amazon a few months back, and they’ve been fantastic. I’d say about a 75 - 80% noise reduction, and the background stuff you play makes up the rest of that difference.

I have always had controllable lucid dreams, pretty much my whole life, but I wouldn’t call the non-control version “fake,” as the realization and knowledge that you’re dreaming is what makes it a lucid dream.

“Controllable” and “non-controllable” would be more accurate than “fake” and “real.”

Is Esperanto similar to what you’re talking about?

No, I think a true universal language is going to need minimal friction, and be as simple and vocab-limited as possible, to encourage mass adaptation.

For all its intent on being easier than other mainstream languages, Esparanto is still more complex than what I’m talking about.

I’d honestly love to see something like that become an actual universal language. Simple grammar, sub 500 words, a little more meat on the bones to eliminate some of the ambiguity, but be easy enough to teach every kid in early grade school. Something that just allows basic communication and is accessible to everyone.

Don’t think it’s going to be an evolved toki pona though, it feels like most of its fan base just wants to keep it an impractical art hobby instead of allowing it to grow up to be something useful.

Airplane 2 (1 actually had pretty common “disaster movie” plot for the time)

Your fun trivia fact for the day is that Airplane! was actually a remake of a 1950s plane disaster movie called Zero Hour! Same plot, even long stretches where they go same plot points and sometimes even shot for shot…

Airplane! just had a tonal change caused by throwing a bunch of ridiculous gags in, essentially becoming a parody of its origin movie.

If you need a YouTube rabbit hole to fill a couple of hours of dead time at some point, well, there you go.

My advice would be to ask a variety of adults (who you know) what they wish they knew when they were in the time period of being your age through their early 20s.

Not everything they say will be applicable to you, or will be impactful, but you’re bound to pick up a few valuable insights that might give you head starts in several areas, if you implement them while very young.

The toughest part of youth is that you can’t know what you don’t yet know, and any strong life lesson shared with you by someone else who endured the pain to get it, so that you don’t have to, is worth its weight in gold.

If they addressed the privacy nightmares that they are likely to present… by not being directly connected to the internet, by using a local and contained personal AI instance, by never being able to film anything with them without it being clearly obvious to others… then I’d be excited for that kind of tech.

But we all know that it’ll turn out to be the dystopian, corporately-connected, data-leaking version of the tech that’ll spread everywhere. So, I’m actually not really looking forward to it.

I mean, Google did this back in the day, does that count?

That’s extremely risky, a TON of people speak Spanish, including a bunch who you would assume did not by surface-level appearance. Your coworker got really lucky that they didn’t get caught and called out.

I’m trying to figure out why a manager would assume that people speaking in Spanish are doing it to have a nefarious, malicious secret code, when Spanish is the fourth-most widely spoken language on the planet, and is not a difficult second language for English speakers to start picking up comprehension with.

If I wanted an evil secret code, wouldn’t I pick something far more obscure?

Fast food has priced itself mostly out of my household. Probably better for our health, but we spend far more time cooking now.

Used to get it probably twice a week for convenience. Now it’s down to about once or twice a month, during the handful of occasional evenings where we have absolutely zero extra time to cook.