“I’ve got” seems particularly strange to me because without the contraction Americans would still just say “I have.” (There are some circumstances where they’ll say “I have got” without a contraction, but it’s mainly when they’re drawing a contrast with what they “haven’t got.” E.g., “No, I don’t have a baseball… oh, but I have got a lacrosse ball, will that work?”)

I think the rule is probably closer to “you don’t contract a stressed verb,” but that’s not terribly useful since there are so few rules about stress patterns. Verbs at the end of sentences are typically stressed, though, so you’re right that ending with that kind of contraction is going to sound wrong to most people.

I think it might be more common in British English? Like “I’ve a fiver says he muffs the kick.” Or “I’ve half a mind to go down there myself.” (Curiously in American English this latter would probably still have the contraction but add a second auxiliary verb: “I’ve got half a mind to…” English is such a mess.)

I think “ct” on this receipt is short for “count” rather than “cent.”

Yeah. At least I managed to pick up a used 3070 a couple years ago. I’ll just jolly along my old i7-7700k system for a few more years…

GPUs at least are actually not that expensive right now. Aside from the 5090, they’re mostly close to MSRP, which is a pretty novel situation. I was waiting to upgrade my whole system for that, though, because my CPU would be a bottleneck at this point, and that’s not really an option now because of the crazy RAM prices. The past few years have been super frustrating for PC builders.

I mean, it is also that OpenAI cornered the RAM market, which is a typical price gouging scenario; it’s just weird that OpenAI wasn’t trying to make money directly through the maneuver. It does seem like they wanted prices to rise, though, to increase the barrier to competition.

Note that it’s not an RPG, though.

Also crabs. I mean, their eyes are often on stalks and more mobile than mammalian eyes, and they’re compound, so they have a very wide field of view, but they’re still often basically in front, and they do apparently provide depth cues for hunting thanks to this.

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/38/31/6933

It also occurred to me to look up about dragonflies, and it seems they mostly hunt dorsally (which is a pretty viable option if you’re flying). BUT I found this article about Damselflies, which notes that they rely on binocular overlap and line up their prey in front of them. Which is pretty cool.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982219316641

Relative to a second currency, as a derivative on the foreign exchange market.

If you haven’t already, check out Ludwig.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KWotO76SuXE

The image looks rather a lot like the “Buddy Christ” from Dogma. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Buddy_christ.jpg

Same. Uggh. It was a bit like a fever, but so much worse. I was absolutely freezing and couldn’t stop shaking and sweating, but I also couldn’t really manage to distract myself with anything because my brain didn’t work, so I just had to lay there and wait. There was also this overwhelming, crushing ringing sound and a feeling like old analog TV static, along with a splitting headache. Thankfully my family were around, of whom I was dimly aware, so I could tell that time was probably passing, and I could kind of gauge that I probably wasn’t getting worse, or they’d take me to a hospital or something. That’s about the limit of what I was aware of, though. It just felt like it went on a really long time. I suspect in reality it didn’t last more than a few hours. I should ask; I’m sure one of them has a clearer memory of that aspect than I do.

deleted by creator

I ran into this just yesterday. My dad’s Windows 10 computer was reporting our printer as offline, even though it wasn’t; it would queue print jobs, but never actually send them. It did this even though it had been printing normally less than half an hour beforehand. It’s connected over Wi-Fi.

And I remembered having solved this problem once before, ages ago (I think like twelve years ago?), by digging through the old Microsoft forums and Google search results, and I had a dim recollection of what sort of thing the solution had been, but not the details. So I figured that, most likely, the fix had gotten undone, probably when I switched him to IoT LTSC edition so he could keep getting security updates. (Both my parents were basically unwilling to switch to 11.)

But when I pulled up search on a browser to see if I could reconstruct the solution I’d found all those years ago, instead I got all this SEO and AI slop. Page after page that claimed to have relevant information, and didn’t. After about fifteen minutes I decided I was better off trying to dig through the settings myself and see if I could reconstruct it from my own memory, kind of like driving through an old neighborhood and seeing if I recognize any landmarks.

I did manage to fix it that way. There’s some kind of dumb aspect to the way Windows gauges whether a printer is online that doesn’t work if it’s connected over wifi. The workaround is to go into the properties for the printer, tell it to change the settings (which brings up a very similar-looking but not actually the same panel), go to the “ports” tab, scroll down to the TCP/IP port with the address of the printer, choose “configure port” which brings up yet another dialog, and at the bottom of that check the box marked “SNMP enabled.” SNMP is “Simple Network Management Protocol,” and lets Windows check the status of the printer in a more sane manner. After doing this the printer reports itself as online and prints normally.

But yeah, I had to rely on my rotting meat storage because our global worldwide network of supercomputers now only serves up blather designed to look like it might hold solutions but not actually contain any of them, because it’s more profitable to delude you into reading endless ad-filled pages of slop than to solve your problem and let you leave.

Honestly the idea that parasites all share a single, simple method of reproduction is the silliest thing in this comic. There’s a cordyceps fungus that not only has a stage in an ant, it then swells and reddens the abdomen of the ant, takes over the behavior of the ant and forces it to climb to the top of a stalk of grass, and has it wave in the air until a bird mistakes it for a berry and swoops down and eats it. At this point it has a whole other phase of its life cycle inside the bird until it finally releases its spores in the bird’s droppings.

(I probably have a few of the details here not quite right, as it’s not my field of expertise, but it’s along these lines, including the behavior modification and the two separate host species.)

There are so many kinds of parasites, and they do so many crazy things.

I’ve seen the term “plutonomy” (like, an economy for plutocrats) to refer to this. At this point almost all economic activity involves the rich, because the rest of us don’t have enough money to amount to much.

As an American, I can confirm, it’s fucking grim here right now.

🎶 The dream of the 90’s is alive in Linux🎶

Don’t forget that he paid for and directed a music video specifically to make fun of Kapoor. It’s called “Bean Boy.”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8XOQ6DbXXOo