It is not a contradiction to refuse your child’s desire for you to adopt a cat and to love a cat. If you force a parent to adopt a cat, they will resent you for foisting an unwanted burden on them. However, the cat has no say in the matter, so it makes no sense to resent or punish the cat. Your parent developing a loving relationship with the pet you forced on them does not absolve you of your imposition.

It’s why IQ tests are fundamentally flawed.

Since you have failed to correctly define the words “highfalutin”, “dogsbody”, “apiary”, “valise”, “collet”, “haruspex”, “threnody”, or even “copse”, we regret to inform you that you are functionally illiterate and likely mentally disabled.

Trump wants to nationalize ad agencies to force them to publish his propaganda, no matter how objectionable they may find it, by the sound of it.

As the Trump administration considers approving a proposed merger between two of the world’s largest advertising agencies, Omnicom Group and Interpublic Group, regulators may impose unusual conditions.

A proposed consent decree would prevent the merged company from boycotting platforms because of their political content by refusing to place their clients’ advertisements on them, according to two people briefed on the matter.

The restrictions being discussed by the Federal Trade Commission as part of its merger review are part of an effort by the Trump administration to use federal agencies to root out what it considers political bias in corporate America against conservative voices and causes.

Alien 1: Wow, humans must go around saying “Kill me…” a lot.

Alien 2: Uh, rude!

Middle-aged human: No, no, that tracks.

No author credit given.

The main issue I have as an editor is that there is no straightforward way to retrain the LLM to correct faulty training as directly or revertably as the existing method of editing an article’s wikicode. Already, much of my time updating Wikipedia is spent parsing puffery and removing phrases like “award-winning” or “renowned”, inserted by malicious advertisers trying to use Wikipedia as a free billboard. If a Wikipedia LLM began making subjective claims instead of providing objective facts backed by citations, I would have to teach myself machine learning and get involved with the developers who manage the LLM’s training. That raises the bar for editor technical competency which Wikipedia historically has been striving to lower (e.g. Visual Editor).

I was familiar with how their single-nucleotide polymorphism fingerprinting worked in principle when I submitted my sample. So, I was not surprised when my report indicated majority Native American (both my parents were born in the Navajo Nation).

As for preventing misuse of the genetic profile 23andMe built, the primary legal protection is the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) which prohibits insurance providers and employers from discriminating against patients and employees based upon disorders that are correlated with their genetic information. I believe it is prudent for people to examine their own genetic information in detail. I believe the legal protection GINA offers is sufficient for SNP profiling. I also believe as genetic profiling technology improves, the principles of non-discrimination set by GINA should be peotected with additional legislation.

Here’s my Bash script for combining a directory of .mp3 files into a single .mkv container using ffmpeg. It also reëncodes the audio using the opus codec which can help smooth out weird encoding artifacts from sloppily created MP3 files. The script retains the original MP3 file partitions as seekable chapters named after the input file names. I find it useful for some audiobooks purchased from libro.fm which are only available in MP3 format.

2025: commit all the crimes you want, pin them on an immigrant scapegoat, get them extrajudiciously deported, no questions asked, no investigation, and badda-bing-badda-boom, you’re Scott-free! It’s basically the modern equivalent of lynching a black guy to keep a good old boy out of jail but official.

Sorry, I didn’t know there was a Nobel prize in economics. Is this one of those pseudo-Nobel prizes that has nothing to do with dynamite?

I think the cognitive reset that psychedelics can awaken come in basically two varieties: delusions of grandeur or empathy. Elon Musk has benefitted from privilege, luck, and the immunity to consequences that comes from being a figurehead leader for people who expect him to make the right noises to support their cause. This lucky run has fueled his fantasy of making humans an interplanetary species like in his Iain M. Banks science fiction novels that he uses to name his SpaceX vehicles.

In Elon Musk’s case, engineers at Tesla and SpaceX have shared his technocratic vision up until he tried to adopt Trump’s Maga base away from Trump (e.g. with his fascist Nazi salute). Engineers of solar panels, self-driving cars, and space vehicles have to have a minimum level of empathy to deal with the stresses of working in teams to overcome difficult problems; most probably genuinely want to help humanity by expanding capitalism to asteroid mining and Mars colonies; the Maga mob, though, have much more grounded ambitions of restoring their socioeconomic dominance over cultures not their own. Attempting to curry favor with both at the same time only works if your leadership inspiring improvements in solar panel, self-driving car, and space technology dominate news stories with success after success, building and maintaining momentum beyond what Trump can disrupt with his own media stunts like the tariff posturing. But Trump has succeeded in making the Maga faction feel victimized and dominated the news cycle so far in 2025.

Elon and Trump are both salesmen, but the latter only has to break things to get attention. So, I am not surprised that Elon finds solace in mind-altering drugs to comfort himself from the realization that his support base simply is smaller than Trump’s.

Is it sold already wet within their packaging?

If it were water soluble, it would have already dissolved before you opened the packaging.

I wish that worm had finished the job.

Speak for yourself. Gestures to children triggering their own gag reflex for fun and profit

OP’s article is 3 months old, being dated 2025-02-11.

I’m pretty sure no one knows my blog and wiki exist, but it sure is popular, getting multiple hits per second 24/7 in a tangle of wiki articles I autogenerated to tell me trivia like whether the Great Fire of London started on a Sunday or Thursday.

What if it was reaaaaally fluffy down?

Frieren reminds me of my readings about the 19th century Texas Rangers (see Cult of Glory (2020) by Doug J. Swanson) and how Native Americans were literally seen as vermin to be exterminated, even if they assisted in exterminating other indigenous. In real life, a lack of communication and 15th century epidemics divided indigenous peoples who could have otherwise defended their sovereignty; once indigenous children learned the conquering host people’s language (English) and affirmative action applied to close egregious wealth gaps, indigenous people have proved to be ordinary people with another skin color (evidence: me, a member of the Navajo Nation). Frieren, in contrast, portrays a demon child as being irredeemably evil even though they learn the host language and are given second chances and extra attention (by the Himmel); the author implies there is some cognitive divide due to demons being solitary creatures who raise and teach themselves from a very early age (presumably much earlier than the failed experiment Himmel performed); however, that subtlety isn’t emphasized and demons are more akin to starfish aliens than people.

Overall, I think provoking controversy and discussion around this point is valuable because it invites people to debate the nature of Otherness. In which ways can a person be different enough before they stop being people? What exactly are the differences between “person” and “beast”? Is focusing on those differences the root cause of genocide? Do we hesitate to relax the requirements to be considered a person because we dislike the economic consequences? (e.g. the horror of teaching factory farmed animals to speak)

I personally consider demons in Frieren analogous to indigenous before colonizing powers, albeit sustained by their long life spans and tendency to independently discover powerful technology (magic). I doubt the author is thinking very hard along these lines, and so fear they will fall back on tried and true story patterns in which animalistic heathens are purged to make way for civilization. But I hope to be surprised.

Relevant quote from Anathem (2008) by Neal Stephenson:

“You say of course there are criminals, but if you look at a particular person, how do you know whether or not he is a criminal? Are criminals branded? Tattooed? Locked up? Who decides who is and isn’t a criminal? Does a woman with shaved eyebrows say ‘you are a criminal’ and ring a silver bell? Or is it rather a man in a wig who strikes a block of wood with a hammer? Do you thrust the accused through a doughnut-shaped magnet? Or use a forked stick that twitches when it is brought near evil? Does an Emperor hand down the decision from his throne written in vermilion ink and sealed with black wax, or is it rather that the accused must walk barefoot across a griddle? Perhaps there is ubiquitous moving picture [technology]—what you’d call [video cameras]—that know all, but their secrets may only be unlocked by a court of eunuchs each of whom has memorized part of a long number. Or perhaps a mob shows up and throws rocks at the suspect until he’s dead.”

Either Butlerian Jihad or Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.