Setting aside stuff like Plan Nine and Manos and The Room and Birdemic, probably Star Trek XI, the one that JJ made. Splicing together test footage of Bela Lugosi and his chiropractor is one thing, but desecrating something beautiful is a sin.

The funny thing about heliocentrism is, that isn’t really the modern view either. The modern view is that there are no privileged reference frames, and heliocentrism and geocentrisms are just questions of reference frame. You can construct consistent physical models from either, and for example, you’ll probably use a geocentric model if you’re gonna launch a satellite.

But another fun one is the so-called discovery of oxygen, which is really about what’s going on with fire. Before Lavoisier, the dominant belief was that fire is the release of phlogiston. What discredited this was the discovery of materials that get heavier when burned.

Userland malloc comes from libc, which is most likely glibc. Maybe this will tell you what you wanna know: https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/MallocInternals

Sounds like gin and tea, served hot with a twist of lemon.

I’m not sure this is a level headed take… They say, when someone tells you who they are, believe them. Meta has already made it very clear who they are; I’m not sure skepticism is really in order.

I’m not a Mastodon expert, but I’m pretty sure you can still get their memes if they reply to you (or @ you), or if they post to a tag you’re following.

Well… They are of course right about the fact that these sorts of decentralized systems don’t have a lot of privacy. It’s necessary to make most everything available to most everyone to be able to keep the system synchronized.

So stuff like Meta being able to profile you based on statistical demographic analysis basically can’t be stopped.

It seems to me, the dangers are more like…

Meta will do the usual rage baiting on its own servers, which means that their upvotes will reflect that, and those posts will be pushed to federated instances. This will almost certainly pollute the system with tons of stupid bullshit, and will basically necessitate defederating.

It’ll bring in a ton of, pardon the word, normies. Facebook became unsavory when your racist uncle started posting terrible memes, and his memes will be pushed to your Mastodon feed. This will basically necessitate defederating.

Your posts will be pushed to Meta servers, which means your racist uncle will start commenting on them. This will basically necessitate defederating.

Then yes there’s EEE danger. Hopefully the Mastodon developers will resist that. On the plus side, if Meta does try to invade Lemmy, I’m pretty confident the Lemmy developers won’t give them the time of day.

The actual answer is that “difficult” comes from “difficulty,” which is itself from the French “difficulté.” “Cult” is a direct shortening of the Latin “cultus.”

If you ever really want to look at word origins, the Online Etymology Dictionary is great: https://www.etymonline.com/word/cult#etymonline_v_450

I sometimes get mistaken for the human pope, while you can clearly see that I’m the raccoon pope.

While there are technical solutions to that problem, realistically it’s only a problem if people start thinking they’re celebrities. Personally I prefer a platform that lets people dunk on celebrities.

So uh… who put the house up for sale? Did the bank foreclose on the house?

Fun question, but it leads to other questions…

First, are vampires stopped at the property line, or only at the threshold of some appurtenance (e.g., a house)? After all, you’re asking about real estate, and real estate is primarily concerned with land, not buildings.

This sort of matters because, are we assuming that vampire law is coincident with human law? By this I mean, if vampires were to take control of the government and abolish real estate law, would they then be able to enter any property or building, anywhere, anytime?

If vampires do observe human law, then realistically, they probably wouldn’t be able to enter a leasehold without the tenant’s permission. The fundamental right of tenancy is peaceful enjoyment, and in fact tenancy is a legal property right, to access the property in question and do anything, without undue burden, allowed under the terms of the lease. It would be a violation of peaceful enjoyment for a landlord to allow vampires into the unit.

The right of inspection, by the way, is explicitly carved out in real estate law. The right to let vampires into the unit is, to my knowledge, not enumerated.

The other issue to consider is MBAs. Or at least the MBA way of thinking, that “caring about customers” actually means “leaving money on the table.” The relentless search for “business efficiency,” evaluated in pure accounting terms, can easily lead to destroying the core business due to a lack of understanding of how the core business shows up on a P&L statement.

This phenomenon is as old as history.

Socrates was killed because he made fun of powerful people. Anaxagoras was exiled from Athens for arguing that the sun and moon are just fire and rock, rather than gods. Galileo was persecuted because he got into a pissing match with the Jesuits over the nature of comets, then when the Pope’s support for Galileo’s (geocentric) views wavered (…they wavered for political reasons), Galileo wrote a treatise ridiculing the Pope. Hearst and Pulitzer propagandized the US into the Spanish-American War. Mondale lost the election because the media decided he looked ridiculous.

Yeah the internet is terrible for discourse, but the more basic fact is that almost all humans suck at discourse. Even, or maybe especially, Galileo.

Probably the biggest issue is getting all the “find a community” stuff together: the communities for new communities, and the crawlers that list communities and let you search them.

This is the curation effect: generate lots of chaff, and have humans search for the wheat. Thing is, someone’s already gotten in deep shit for trying to use deep learning for legal filings.

I guess the important thing to understand about spurious output (what gets called “hallucinations”) is that it’s neither a bug nor a feature, it’s just the nature of the program. Deep learning language models are just probabilities of co-occurrence of words; there’s no meaning in that. Deep learning can’t be said to generate “true” or “false” information, or rather, it can’t be meaningfully said to generate information at all.

So then people say that deep learning is helping out in this or that industry. I can tell you that it’s pretty useless in my industry, though people are trying. Knowing a lot about the algorithms behind deep learning, and also knowing how fucking gullible people are, I assume that—if someone tells me deep learning has ended up being useful in some field, they’re either buying the hype or witnessing an odd series of coincidences.

It is possible to buy a car in less than an hour, though I agree that you can’t buy real estate that quickly. New Yorkers might be able to pull off stocks, if the money comes to them while the NYSE is open, but I’m not in New York (or Chicago, for the Mercantile Exchange, or…)

It’s kind of a bizarre question, though. I have several small business owner friends. Could I get them to mark up a croissant to $1M, with the understanding they’ll cut me in on the revenue?

If not, then what really are the terms of the question? Arms length transactions only? How will that be adjudicated?

I think there’s a more important question here… There are people who do access the room? Why? Who are they? That leads to the actually relevant question, how would those people secure a room?

If nobody needs to access the room, then the room shouldn’t be accessible. By that I mean, it should be underground with no points of access, just an inaccessible underground chamber.

Then you should head on over to 4chan.org, where you can be an obnoxious child to your heart’s content.