As opposed to French, which famously exists as a natural truth of the universe. Even if we had never discovered French it would still be there… waiting.

I haven’t seen a Darths & Droids reference in the wild in a while.

I remember just cackling the first time I read their Episode I comics.

Have you played Caesar 3 with the Augustus mod? Its like a whole new game. It adds a ton and there’s even a whole fan-made campaign.

Yeah, that’s cute and all but then it starts raining and the whole experience becomes miserable. I’ll happily take “public transit that’s nice to use in any weather” over “public transit that is aesthetically pleasing when it’s sunny out”.

I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 mods installed for Rimworld. The in-game mod management system is pretty basic and simply does not cut it. Definitely interested in more management options.

There are islands out there. If you truly think you would prefer that life you can just… go do it.

You don’t even need an island. You could wander off into the jungle of Vietnam and never hear from society again.

Copilot is a LLM. So it’s just predicting what should come next, word by word, based off the data its been fed. It has no concept of whether or not its answer makes sense.

So if you’ve scraped a bunch of open source github projects that this guy has worked on, he probably has a lot of TODOs assigned to him in various projects. When Copilot sees you typing “TODO(” it tries to predict what the nextthing you’re going to type is. And a common thing to follow “TODO(” in it’s data set is this guy’s username, so it goes ahead and suggests it, whether or not the guy is actually on the project and suggesting him would make any sort of sense.

Extremely disappointed to discover that this isn’t by the other Edward Teach. Please give me Blackbeard’s extensively sourced treatise on porn.

Do you have a fireplace or wood burning stove? Mosquitos hide dormant in dead wood over the winter, so it’s not uncommon to bring in some logs from outside and have the mosquitos inside wake up, thinking it’s spring in your nice warm house.

I learned this when I was getting bites inside my own house with sub-freezing temperatures outside.

Hello there, sounds like you’re experiencing survivorship bias.

Its rare for you to see this, sure. Same for everyone else. But people aren’t here to post screenshots of “look at this website where I didn’t get flagged for having an ad blocker.” So we just see a lot of screenshots where it is a problem, because that’s what is noteworthy. There isn’t someone out there getting flagged on every single website they open, we’re just sampling a large population of user for only the websites where people do get flagged.

Why are we talking about this at all? Because it is becoming more common and more intrusive. This example is particularly egregious because you’re already on the website to give them money. They’re complaining to the user they they don’t get to make money off of them while taking their money, which is ridiculous.

There are actually 4 states that were independent countries at one point or another.

Hawai’i

Texas

California

Vermont

You’re correct that Jupiter is the brightest object in the night sky besides (obviously) the sun and the moon.

The brightest star is Sirius, near the constellation Orion.

Polaris is absolutely NOT the brightest star in the sky. Not even close.

How to actually find it: Find the big dipper (I know you know what it looks like). Take the two stars at the front end of the “cup” part. Draw a line through them “up” and out of the cup until you hit a star. That’s it.

I’m going to print this out and frame it on the wall of my office.

Squeal

“Sorry, I’m under a pretty strict NDA and I’m not allowed to discuss it.”

No idea. He used the money he saved to help for a down payment in a condo.

A friend of mine lived in downtown Boston during the pandemic. Like, across the street from the Garden. His building lost a TON of tenents when people fled the city since they could now work remotely. He was going to move as well, but then the building offered to reduce his rent by $700/month if he stayed. So he did.

If you like Mysterium, I highly recommend the successor game Obscurio. Its pretty much the same gimmick of art interpretation, but works way better for groups.

Instead of the “ghost” having to keep track of and pick art for each person, the “investigators” are making a group decision so you only need to pick one set of clue art. This means the ghost’s turn is way faster (doesn’t explode with higher player count) and there’s actually group interaction instead of each person in their own world, staring at art no one else cares about.

The way it’s set up also means the ghost can start working on choosing the art for the next round while the group is debating, not having to wait to see if they are correct or not, so it’s way more streamlined. All together just a snappier, more engaging version of Mysterium.

I love driving stick. Or I did up until the day my left knee fell apart. Now it’s just not an option for me.