“Blind box” in the tech context is an algorithm that hides its operations from everyone, even its own creators. You give it an input, and then it produces an output, without showing you how it arrived to that output.

Yeah, George would think he’s spotted some slick NFT grift or crypto rug pull that it turns out he was the one getting rug pulled, by Newman.

Yes, just like how tax preparation companies lobby to keep the IRS from just telling people what they owe in taxes. It keeps the tax prep companies in business.

Well, the show has been off the air for a long time, but I absolutely could see Kramer having an AI chatbot girlfriend, or George Costanza trying to get people suckered into an NFT grift/cryptocurrency side hustle.

Was PayPal always evil, though? The concept of it wasn’t. People wanted an easier way to conduct transactions electronically. Something faster and more convenient than, say, a Western Union money transfer order.

To go a little more in-depth, if a product would simplify certain aspects of life, make them more straightforward and less prone to a chain of comedic errors, then it’s a good product.

If a product makes things more complex, has more things to go wrong, and more corners and edge cases for some weirdo like Kramer or George to think they’ve spotted a killer side hustle, then it’s a bad product.

Now, I’m not saying that smartphones and computers and the Internet aren’t complicated, but they are far simpler to how things were done before. Read old hobbyist magazines to get a sense of the complex system of self-addressed stamped envelopes and hand-compiled mailing lists it used to take to get info on your hobby. Meeting a friend in a nearby town to go see a movie at a theater you haven’t been to before required a shocking number of cross-referenced paper resources.

Yes, modernize zoning, and also include vacancy taxing. Apartment complexes will keep entire units empty and just jack up rents on the remaining tenants rather than lower rents to fill the empty units, and that must end.

I’m enjoying it. It feels like the game that Obsidian wanted the first one to be, but couldn’t quite get there, for whatever reason.

Nuclear fusion has made great strides. There currently an experimental Tokamak in China that set a new record for sustained fusion in 2023, then earlier this year broke that record again.

What this guy said. Or, even better, why doesn’t Captain Aggravated just go make their own movie? It’s not super complicated to do, but it does require getting others involved, since nobody can do everything.

I don’t want them to “cure autism” by erasing it, either. I’d rather they try to “cure autism” by improving on what it can help a human be capable of doing. That way, if we have a real-life “Butlerian Jihad” like from the lore of Dune, we have Mentats (human computers) to replace “thinking machines”(AI and computers).

As I recall, the reason the Federation outlawed genetic manipulation is due to what happened with the Eugenics Wars, the details of which are murky due to temporal interference, but one of the root causes was clear. While the end results of genetic engineering (Khan Noonien-Singh and his Augments) were undoubtedly superior to normal humans in every way, they also incredibly aggressive and arrogant, a flaw their creators could not correct, as the science was still in its infancy. One of the scientists remarked that “Superior ability breeds superior ambition”.

And in the US, religious assholes want to ban IVF for exactly this reason, because it’s “playing God”.

Not all gun owners like the current situation.

Source: Gun Owner, do not like current situation. There’s a vast difference between a responsible gun owner and those ammosexuals who just want to be given an excuse to open fire at anything.

The rich already have the class war. They just want to make sure we don’t find out they’re the ones attacking. I remember some rich lady journalist put out some opinion piece warning the working class against seeking a class war, and to just keep fighting the culture wars.

Ah, here it is!

Yeah, Alice Thomson wrote this for The Times back in July of last year, bitching about how the candidates in the UK Parliament elections were touting their working class roots.

Not even close to a transphobe and my mind is still blown at the fact of the nonexistence of fish.

It’s the sequel to the first one, and historical accuracy was like, at the center of of that one. Your character starts off the game not knowing how to read, because in medieval Europe, literacy was not widespread and the son of a blacksmith certainly wouldn’t know how to read, so books you pick up in the game are total gibberish until you learn to read.

We should send genetically modified cockroaches and algae. Then check back 500 years later. Surely there’s no way it can go wrong

JOHJ in the distance

Looks like we need him again.