quicklime

Based on having read this same SFGate article about five days ago, I made an online appointment for a booster shot at a Safeway store’s pharmacy, semi local to me in San Francisco. My previous booster was circa last November so it had been more than six months, and the recent news stories about a surge of covid detected in the city’s sewer outflows and also a general rising wave of cases locally seemed to give good reason to stay on the six month program rather than wait until it had been a year.

The appointment was easily made online, but the pharmacy telephoned me and told me their advice was to just wait closer to a year unless I was over 65 or immune compromised. Neither applies so I cancelled the shot.

Good for $25 off any elective procedure costing twenty thousand dollars or more!

Along the same lines, let’s not forget L. Ron Hubbard, who founded Scientology some years after telling a sci-fi writers’ convention that starting an actual cult would be a great way to make far more money off science fiction than just by writing it.

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Exactly. Even if he gets an appeal, even if he wins such an appeal, even if his sentence gets commuted or otherwise obstructed or diluted, we can truthfully refer to him forever and always as a convicted felon on 34 counts.

He was never fucking charming…

I mean, granted for sure he’s gotten worse, but I don’t trust people who gave him a pass before the past couple of years.

My favorite way to visualize the meaning of “asshat”: the person is such a sad waste of human life that their entire upper body is effectively just a hat for their posterior.

Thanks for this. I’m glad you didn’t have to deal with searing pain since panic is already more than enough.

I don’t mean this to invalidate your experience in any way; I’ll just state sources to make clear where I got that idea.

https://medilexinc.com/a-spoonful-of-medicine-blog/the-process-of-drowning

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8928428

Yes, drowning is known to be quite painful but only for a very brief time before unconsciousness sets in.

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I spent a long time living in places that had saved their one last ‘classic’ movie theater by turning it into a rerun palace for ‘art films’, cult classics and other specialty cinema.

Also, I bought the DVD of Baraka that came out in the late 90s or so, and I was so disappointed in how visually awful the digital transfer was at that time, the disc was honestly not even worth watching. Not just because of small screens, the problem was that whoever did the digital transfer had completely fucked up the frame rate conversion in a way that caused every one of the many time-lapse sequences to move with a really annoying jitter. There was no possible playback setting or processing to fix it either, the process had removed information making it impossible to smooth or recover, at least back then.

So that junk DVD motivated me to just keep grabbing anyone I could, or no one if no one was around, and going out of my way to see the movie every time it came to a big screen within an hour of me. Now it’s been years since my last watch… I’m not sure how much more I could take of it now that it’s so clear the human race already sold out its long term survival for short term gain.

I could go with that.

Still having a hard time with the idea that a thing could be even “some level of intelligent” without being sentient. But we don’t need to continue from there, there’s any number of people ready to pile on at that point and say that it’s “all semantics anyway” or start deconstructing sentience.

Sure, we could say that the popular usage of the term AI no longer actually stands for “artificial intelligence”. Or we could say that the term “artificial intelligence” is no longer understood to refer to something that can do a large part of what actual intelligence can do.

But then we would need a new word for actual, real intelligence and that seems like a lot of wasted effort. We could just have the words mean what they’ve always meant. There is a lot of good in spreading public awareness of the vast gap between machines that seem as if they understand a language (when actually they just deeply model its patterns) and imaginary machines that are equipped to actually think.

Some newer Lemmy users thru some third-party reader apps may need to click HD to get enough pixels to make the image readable before zooming.

I’m here via Boost, for example, and unless I were to set it to always pre-request HD images (and thereby consume far more bandwidth, unwanted) I have to manually click HD.

I mean… it’s not artificial intelligence no matter how many people continue the trend of inaccurately calling it that. It’s a large language model. It has the ability to write things that look disturbingly close, even sometimes indistinguishable, to actual human writing. There’s no good reason to mistake that for actual intelligence or rationality.

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Baraka – I’ve seen it at least a dozen times, most of them in movie theaters.

I haven’t been on FB for several years, but ugh there was a while in the late 2010s when so many people over there were referring to FB groups as sites and just arghh arrghh aaarrgghhh.