Signtist

Sounds like a blast, but I think I’m too introverted for that, haha! Even just having my own small family over at one time has me socially exhausted.

Huh, I never even considered just doing 1 thanksgiving and inviting everyone even if they don’t know each other. We’ve always just done 2 events for any major holiday, sometimes 3 or 4 if we wanted to do something with different friend groups.

My wife and I have been together for 9 years, married for 3. I think our wedding was the 2nd or 3rd time our respective parents met each other, and they haven’t met since. Not a whole lot of time to build attraction. What events are you planning where 2 completely different families want to hang out with each other?

I can certainly think of some days that were bleak enough to not have any good sides; I prefer to think that all new days have potential, no matter how dark yesterday might’ve been.

Alarms worked perfectly for me. I might have dozens of alarms going off all the time, but I never forget stuff anymore! I make them automatically now, too; sometimes I’ll even go to make one after discussing plans with someone, and find that I already did it without thinking while we were talking.

Rich and powerful people used their power to make themselves richer. What, you thought they would use their power to benefit us? How do you think they got it in the first place? The only reason powerful people ever did anything for our benefit is because we used to burn down the houses and other possessions of the powerful people that didn’t.

They’re a for-profit company. What they want is money, and they don’t care who they have to piss off to get it. The only time any company does what customers want is when they think they’d make less money by going against it. Sony knows it’ll make more money even after some fans leave, because most won’t. The only influence we have is our money, because the only factor that matters is money.

I remember being so excited for PS3 given how much I loved PS2. First I had to wait over a year to get one because they produced way too few units for release, and it was sold out everywhere with scalpers trying to pass it off for $1,000+. Then, when I finally got one for a reasonable price, the game variety was just really shallow. If you aren’t into shooters and sports games there just isn’t much to find. Little Big Planet was pretty much the only game I spent a significant amount of time playing on my PS3. I never bothered with Sony after that, despite the fact that the PS2 is still far and away my favorite console of all time.

I have no faith in the voting system, and I vote anyway. It’s not like you can boycott voting - if both parties truly are in on it, then it’s not like they’re going to change anything just because turnout is low. If the solution lies elsewhere, which I believe it does, then whether or not you’re voting will have no effect on anything. Don’t be so sure you’re right that you throw away what could be a useful tool if you’re wrong.

Hedge your bets and take an hour or two out of your day every year to at the very least try to nudge things away from the worst possible outcome. It’s not like we’re anywhere near actually coming together and enacting our second amendment rights to force real change anytime soon anyway. Apathy got us into this mess - don’t think even more apathy will help; action will be what gets us out, if anything.

Companies have always done everything they can to take as much as we’ll let them and give as little as we’ll let them. Then they realized that they can just put out “educational” videos that specifically train us to let them take as much as they want and give as little as possible.

Good picture, but I would’ve preferred it if he looked happier and with his mouth open.

Man, if I rolled a 1 attempting to push someone off a cliff my DM would absolutely have me miss and stumble off the cliff.

Damn, that sucks. But yeah, legal battles are so exhausting that even when you win you just feel tired.

It’s still very important for genetic testing. If someone has a genetic mutation, it can be difficult to know whether that mutation is going to cause its associated protein to stop working or not. Even if we know all of the “normal” proteins in the body, there are countless variants based on people’s specific genetic differences that may or may not have major effects on how those proteins fold, which in turn can have major effects on those individuals’ health.

To be clear, I wasn’t necessarily disagreeing about AI’s utility, just about how protein fold AI isn’t the same as LLM AI; we’ve used computer models for predictions of protein structure and genetic mutation severity for a while, though they have always been taken with a grain of salt that I fear is no longer being done - a prediction is still a prediction, after all. Doctors were already incorrectly confusing computer model predictions of genetic mutation severity for positive test results back when I was working as a genetic counselor in the 2010’s - my concern is that the widespread trust of “AI” is only going to exacerbate that.

I’m a bit confused, though. The AI doing it was AlphaFold, which is shutting down. Shouldn’t your statement be AI was already doing it? Gemini is an LLM - not the same type of thing as AlphaFold, despite the fact that they’re both called “AI,” which was the cause of my original argument. The AI that was doing the protein fold prediction is being replaced with an “AI” that can’t. It looks like there’s still RoseTTAFold, but losing the frontrunner is still not great when it’s shutting down to focus more on LLM’s.

Funny, one of the first arguments I had about AI was with someone who insisted it would be incredibly helpful at predicting protein folds.

I’d normally agree with you, but I imagine in a hypothetical world where food can be 3d printed and one of the filament types was fruit, it’d be pretty important to know whether or not tomato is a fruit if you’re planning on making a pizza.

Weird, I never considered it to be bitter. Like, yeah, 100% dark is for sure bitter, but the 60% I usually see in bars for eating straight just tastes like chocolate, while anything less just tastes like chocolate-flavored milk and sugar. I guess my perspective is off since I ate it from such a young age.

The wealthy have a huge incentive to want unskilled teachers. They’d probably rather go back to the days when only the wealthy were educated at all, but creating a bigger gap between the quality of education of the rich and the poor is a passable short term goal for now.

Remember, the point of a company isn’t to make a product, it’s to make a profit. It’s more profitable to have a dumb population that unquestioningly buys whatever you advertise to them, and if you sell a few crappy AI teaching robots along the way, that’s just a cherry on top.

Huh, I always liked dark chocolate. I think the first time I met a person who didn’t was when I was in college. I still generally consider it a niche thing to dislike.