It reminds me of 30 Rock in that sense, where you can imagine some of these people will become respected names, but some will never deliver a performance as good again for their entire careers.

Also a solid defensive catcher on the baseball team.

I finally started watching Resident Alien, and I’m about halfway through S3. I am a sucker for both sci-fi and Northern Exposure-ish shows where a fish out of water is dropped into a quirky and isolated community, so I don’t really know how I waited so long, but it does mean I don’t have to worry about it getting canceled on a cliffhanger.

As an aside, I watched S1 on a TV with “soap opera vision” motion interpolation turned on, and JFC I forgot how cheap and awful it makes everything look.

you could also use a colon

Now, with the caveat that prescriptive grammar is kind of stupid, you’d need to remove the word ‘that’ to make the colon a “correct” choice.

I get it. We skew older here, but somebody playing around on the fuzzy edges of spelling a gen-z meme is not illiteracy. To be clear, I am also a clueless old, but I thought I’d look it up before piling on.

I’m deep into my 40s, and I’m one of those. I can get up to 70 words per minute for short stretches, but it’s still a weird dance that combines muscle memory and hand-eye coordination.

I did learn just enough to know to hover my hands and keep my arms at a good posture, so I’ve never had any RSI from typing. That also may be partly because that I’m so inconsistent that I don’t get enough of the R for RSI, LOL.

In small but statistically and financially significant numbers, yes, absolutely.

The bigger paradigm shift will be moving corporate users to per-token pricing, and that’s the one that will really kill Anthropic and OpenAI (and maybe Oracle) if it doesn’t go how they need, but there are way more actual people spending money on AI than one might think… or hope.

I like listening to Ed Zitron stuff, though admittedly part of it is AI Doomer comfort food, but one of the drums he beats is that the spend is absolutely obscene, and they’re going to have to start dramatically dialing up the prices, and soon, to have any chance at all of converting to profitability.

From what I’ve seen, even people who like AI won’t pay for anywhere near as much as they’re using now while it’s free or flat rate.

“What’s worse than lies but not as bad as statistics?”

“DAMNED LIES, MOTHERFUCKER.”

Fair enough, LOL. Just love that it’s “oh I pay TONS of taxes, but asking me to pay more in taxes won’t help anything.”

“The top 1% of taxpayers pay about 40% of all the tax revenue, and the bottom half pay 3%,” Bezos said. “I don’t think it should be 3%. I think it should be zero.”

“People sometimes say that, you know, I don’t pay taxes. Not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes,”

“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens. I promise you.”

WT-absolute-F? I think he got oxygen-deprived in space.

Not the main issue of course, but I found this fun:

Both YouTubers said the exposed database records indicated significantly lower customer interest than previously reported. According to Coffeezilla, internal order identifiers suggested roughly 30,000 total orders associated with around 10,000 unique customers, far below earlier public estimates claiming nearly 600,000 reservations.

So this grift will only net them ~$3M, not sixty. My heart weeps for them.

At this point, I think its most lasting cultural impact is everyone’s opinion on how little cultural impact it had.

This is definitely the right community, LOL. I am absolutely a dogs>cats person, but this junior-high school-paper article has me questioning 20 years of a catless house.

There are a lot of very valid criticisms of American football. I love it, sometimes in spite of myself, but I won’t fault anyone who thinks it’s an overly-managed made-for-TV snoozefest with no rhythm whatsoever. For better or worse, though, those helmets and pads do not make it any less of a violent “manly” sport. Far from it: they are the way Americans make ourselves feel better about watching a literal bloodsport with a ball.

The way the game moves and the ruleset reward explosive impacts, and the unlimited substitutions mean players are selected and trained to optimize delivering and enduring that violence instead of, say, actually running for 80 minutes. The result is a dozen hits a game that would make a “biggest hits of the season” compilation video for rugby or Aussie rules. Also chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

America: No.

So many rainbow explosions…

Shows what you know! In most parts of the US, there is no train!

The DeBeers-ish sentimental marketing is also a bit of a scam, which ends up working nicely with the cost being a scam. I am very happy with my 25 year old English Lit degree; it was was what I was able to get through with where I was discipline-wise, and I did learn all those critical thinking and life skills, and it even opened adequate doors, career-wise. I reckon my grades were inflated somewhat by my professors’ sheer relief that I was engaging with the material and, for all their flaws, my papers were obviously my own work. Still, I think my memories would be very different if I had graduated with $180k of student loan debt from a bucolic college somewhere in the New England hills instead of a $2k balance on a Discover Card, incurred over 4.25 years of nonsense at local state U.

I’m all for college, and not just STEM and business. Frankly some our current generation of tech leaders could use to have taken a few more philosophy classes (except for Peter Thiel… oh my) or at least smoked a few more bowls with the liberal arts kids. Still, people need to be clear-eyed about what a degree will and won’t do, and they need to understand that you absolutely can and should put a price-tag on the experiences.

Bloemfontein, I think.