Professors don’t always teach in their actual area of expertise. I had a German language professor whose PhD was in Philosophy and activity published in that field, in English, German and French journals. It does seem like an odd combination, but probably not a lot of students signing up for a class in usability of buttons, even from the fields you would expect to study them .

We have the same thing as your prop 1 on the ballot in South Carolina. It’s already illegal at the state and federal level. It’s just on there to help get low information conservatives to the polls, since they are convinced the Democrats want to change the law to let “the illegals” vote.

They think this is what everyone does. They publicly virtue signal that they oppose whichever bad thing so they can condemn others for doing it while secretly doing it themselves. It’s ok when they do it themselves anyway, because they are good people doing a necessary thing for good reasons. When others find out about their behavior, their reaction is to accuse harder, because they assume we are all doing that too and they are angry that we didn’t get caught yet.

You’re right we’re nowhere close to downtrodden enough for that, but we definitely have enough inequality to want to joke about doing so, which I’m pretty sure is what was happening there.

Those scenes are just there to establish that he’s capable, intelligent and talented in the ways the agency needs, so it’s plausible they would recruit him. Never-mind that they also establish the way he looks at the world and approaches problems which is then forgotten immediately.

That is interesting. I imagined it more like an abstract physics problem than an actual scene. My ball was about 6 inches diameter, made of a nonspecific hard but not very dense material similar to, but not necessarily solid plastic, of no specific color. It was in the center of a table roughly 3 x 6 feet in surface at normal sitting table height, and was also of no specific color or material. The person was just the vague notion of a person applying a push slightly off from across the short axis of the table. The ball bounced slightly on the generic idea of a floor as it rolled away. My mind quickly supplied the additional details when requested, but not until then. (Yellow ball, wood table, etc). If I’d been asked in a way that didn’t feel like a physics problem, but instead asked me to imagine a scene, I would already have had many of those details in my mental view.

WW2 started several years after America ended the Prohibition, and the ice cream barge was commissioned in its later years as the war in the Pacific dragged on. Still, I don’t think the navy was providing alcohol rations, so I imagine it was quite the party atmosphere when the ice cream barge showed up.

The whole point of making a costly sequel is it can’t be a total disaster. If nothing else, “Joker: Folie à Deux” proved that is not the case.

Well, if studios can accept that sequels and remakes actually aren’t immune from being flops, maybe they will be more open to considering new ideas? I won’t get my hopes up, but it’s a nice thought.

an ice cream barge

For those not familiar, the WW2 US Pacific fleet included, no joke, a barge originally built to deliver and mix massive amounts of concrete that was refitted with food grade surfaces and a huge cooling system to supply ice cream throughout the fleet. I mean, it was navy “ice cream” from powder, but it was still a luxury that boosted morale wherever it went. I can only imagine how much it would have hurt Japanese morale if they had found out the US had so much resources to spare that they could waste them on industrial quantities of frozen treats.

I had a housemate who fried sausage patties and eggs in my cast iron skillet every morning for a couple of years. Gave it a good wipe and that’s it. I’d cook other things in it sometimes and wash it up if needed. The seasoning on that thing developed into a deep black that was so smooth you see your reflection in it and you could fry an egg without oil and it came off clean with just a nudge from the spatula. It was beautiful.

We went our separate ways and it quickly degraded back to a more normal “good enough” level of seasoning. It was great, but I’m not frying up a fancy breakfast every morning for it.

Nothing you couldn’t recover from unless he managed to crack it. I’d wipe it down, and hit it with brake parts cleaner. If I was still nervous about contamination, I’d put it in an oven with the self cleaning function and run it. That should burn it back down to bare metal. Then, s good scrub with dish soap to remove any residue and a good seasoning, and you’re back in business. I don’t know if I’d personally skip the heat clean step or not, but I’d definitely put it back in usage.

The analysis I read from a lawyer explained how Wisconsin’s state laws on self defense are weirdly complex, and due to the exact order of events, under those laws, his intent technically didn’t matter, and that’s why it was inadmissible evidence. In most states it would be admissable, and he would be guilty. He even listed the laws out and while I don’t recall any of the details now, it did seem perfectly logical to my layman’s understanding. So it’s not that the judge was biased, it’s just that Rittenhouse, through dumb luck, happened to fall through a legal loophole. Wisconsin needs to fix it’s laws, because it’s abundantly clear he wanted to kill those people and morally speaking, I consider him to be an unrepentant murderer.

It’s not an official requirement anywhere I’ve heard of, but I do recall cases where people have noticed police departments declining to hire applicants who scored too high on their aptitude test. I think someone even sued over it, but the court found that being too smart was not a protected class, so the department was within their rights to do that. Or something like that, it’s been a while since that story broke.

Yes, hallucination is the now standard term for this, but it’s a complete misnomer. A hallucination is when something that does not actually exist is perceived as if it were real. LLMs do not perceive, and therefor can’t hallucinate. I know, the word is stuck now and fighting against it is like trying to bail out the tide, but it really annoys me and I refuse to use it. The phenomenon would better be described as a confabulation.

Yeah, I don’t think it would lose her a lot, but some. Little enough that it would be a notable net gain in her favor. I was just acknowledging that it’s a non-zero amount. I’m voting for her, and it wouldn’t bother me any either, as you probably assumed from me suggesting it. I do have opinions on gun control (neither more nor less, just make it better tuned), but I barely consider it when voting because I have much stronger opinions on social safety nets, capital’s disproportionate influence, the health of the environment we live in, and so many other issues.

I’ll just repeat someone else’s idea I saw elsewhere on Lemmy. She and Walz should challenge Trump and Vance to a marksmanship contest down at the gun range. He’d never go for it, but the image is hilarious. Admittedly, it would lose Harris some support from her base, but it would lose Trump a lot more from his to see him being shown up in such a visible way on one of his base’s favorite topics. Harris has stated that she is a gun owner, and you know she’s the type to take safety and skill training before she ever bought one, while on the other hand, if pansy-ass Trump has ever handled a live firearm in his life I will eat my hat. Both VP candidates have military training, but I’d still expect a pretty big skill gap between a decorated career infantry NCO and a newspaper staffer in a uniform.

Grandma Lucy’s organic dog treats are made to be fully human and dog safe and I find them just as tasty as the dog does. They’re like unsweetened Teddy Grahams. I know this because my brother-in-law gets them for his dog and is very amused to offer them as a snack to people as he and the dog both enjoy them.

I had guessed it was Sri Lanka since it is also shown just off the coast of India. Then I figured it was more likely Indonesia given it’s surrounded by so many other islands and not that close to India. But yeah, now that I know that the name meant Japan I’m wondering if it’s depiction on the map is a conflagration of accounts of Indonesia and Japan.

How dare you, I’m sure that they are good patriotic American English professors! They’re just from a different state than you.

No, don’t you all see? He’s actually so genius that we mere mortals can’t comprehend his brilliance, as attested to by his multiple friends who are totally real English professors who exist and spend time with him, and are definitely not fictitious people he just made up on the spot to try to strengthen an obviously bullshit argument. Well, no, you wouldn’t have heard them, because they, um, teach at a different school, but the important part is that they are intelligent enough to see the clever underlying structure of his wide ranging and definitely intellectually brilliant speeches, which the rest of us apparently aren’t.