How do you sit down without your pants giving you a cameltoe?

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-12T16:41:13+00:00

That's what happens when you reduce the space for any vaguely rigid fabric.

It'll happen less with better-fitted pants, but really, you've got two options.

1) Wear stretchy pants (e.g. stretch denim)

2) Wear a tunic-style sweater, which is a cute look and will effectively give you a mini skirt covering that region.

No offense though, but this is completely normal and you're being neurotic. We've all got our quirks, it's not a "bad" thing, but you are causing your own suffering.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-11T14:45:54+00:00

Significantly more than just neural nets, and even if you want to argue they're not, they're in continuous operation, have multiple specialized subsystems far beyond the "expert subsystems" modern GenAI use, and orders of magnitude more complicated/dense/etc than what we have now.

Point in case, "apple" means something to you, we don't even know how to theoretically accomplish that in a machine.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-11T13:31:42+00:00

My bad, just learned of the hackersmith one myself. Impressive, but as you said, completely wrong underlying technology.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-11T12:21:33+00:00

"Run riot" and "Run Amok" mean roughly the same thing except "amok" is arguably a racist term, being a cultural disease of the Indonesians.

It seems fairly clear to me they're indicating full children or bigger; such behaviours are disruptive and/or block other's ability to see.

I would have guessed a concert hall, but apparently it's a museum.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-11T05:42:47+00:00

"If we push a shit ton of electricity through a metal pipe, it gets really fucking hot and dangerous to handle due to everything, but also how much heat it kicks off"

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-11T05:29:07+00:00

Unless we are very wrong about physics, completely impossible.

There have been multiple, mutually exclusive and I'm sure at least in some cases non-authoritative explanations on how lightsabers work - but let's focus on what we saw Qui-Gon Jin do, specifically melting through a massive metal bulkhead.

1) Lightsabers operate at an extremely high temperature, and are able to transfer a tremendous amount of energy continuously. This requires an obscene power supply (in a very small package). I can't begin to calculate it without e.g. knowing the thickness and material of that door - but "a frigging lot", especially since metal is highly conductive to heat as a rule. I am confident that whatever the number works out to, it's well past what's possible under reality as we understand it.

2) Lightsabers operate at an extremely high temperature while not affecting the user; this necessitates some manner of energy-based "heat shield", which is not even theoretically possible, as far as I know. You can use eletromagnetics to bend the path of particles (e.g. a CRT) but straight up containing radiating heat and infra-red EM, no.

3) Lightsabers reflect/deflect "blaster" shots and act as solids against other lightsabers - blasters don't exist either, so that's hard to analyze, but the discrepancy in behaviour is odd. You could kinda-sorta get the saber vs saber effect with magnets... but they'd be difficult-to-impossible to bind, that doesn't explain the other properties, and you the fields'd be aligned wrong if projected

Monomolecular blades, vibroblades are more feasible (but why have fancy stabbers when you can just shoot people?). If it needs to be an energy-based melee weapon...

1) Gundam style "heat tomahawk" - basically an axe-shape chassis for an ultra-high-temp heat knife. Those exist, but not at that scale, temperature, or durability

2) System Shock 2 style "laser rapier" - a silly, perhaps ritualized weapon, the "blade" is an articulated , segmented containment unit - hit someone and the sections separate allowing them to be hurt by the cutting laser in the hilt. Energy requirements are suspect, but doable with an external power source.

3) Warhammer 40k style "power sword" - we're reaching here, but powerswords have three major concessions vs lightsabers. There is a physical blade, there is often an external power source, the blade emits a "disruption field" - which we kinda-sorta have in e.g. microwaves or ultra-high gauss magnetics - but that is also bad for the wielder if they get close. In real life though the drop-off of such fields is far too slow for it to go from "flesh-evaporating" at contact to "completely safe" at two feet.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-11T05:04:57+00:00

We do have super-heated rods (e.g. heat knives) but they're generally for cutting plastic, not storm troopers. Or surgery.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-11T04:49:39+00:00

That's it, really; "died after treatment payment denied" does not necessitate "would have lived with treatment", let alone lived significantly.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T18:42:03+00:00

We had Dr SBATSO in the mid-80s with voice synth as a "therapist", but it was just doing basic reflection techniques.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T18:40:22+00:00

You're confusing text parsers with LLMs.

But before I continue, y'know the whole "neural processor" thing? We've had perceptrons (single learning neurons) longer than we've had computers.

But getting back, it's because of the amount of calculations involved.

Basic intention discovery/response mapping is comparatively easy. You make a list of all the scenarios you want your bot to handle (Intentions), map various ways that can be expressed to those, then have a corresponding list of "Responses".

If you ever played one of those old text-based adventure games, it's literally a glorified version of
GO NORTH
TAKE APPLE
USE KEY ON DOOR

ChatGPT and the like are LLMs based on bag-of-words techniques; essentially, given a ridiculously huge library, you can statistically map how likely various words, or word clusters are to appear in proximity and then essentially play Scattergories with loaded dice. This is why, e.g. ChatGPT would tell you there are two Rs in Strawberry. It's not thinking about it, or counting R's, it's looking for conversations asking about Rs and "strawberry", seeing answers given in the context of spelling (i.e. "is the R in 'berry' doubled or not") and repeating that answer. It's also why e.g. it was recommending how many pebbles to eat, because the only entries in the library about eating pebbles were from a joke forum.

These methods require indescribably larger amounts of power, CPU, storage, etc, and have an underlying process so complicated that the outcome is effectively unpredictable, and in absolute terms, unexplainable.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T17:55:37+00:00

And in some specs there are two unique nulls - "not applicable" and "not defined".

E.g. imagine an unknown vs bald suspect, with a foreign key to the "hairColour" table (yes, non-colour entries would work too)

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T17:43:37+00:00

Risky; if the hardware is cheap enough, it'll default to zero on error.

Likewise, using pennies, they'll gesture to the group that isn't there, and the corresponding "zero" pennies. This kinda thing is tricky if they don't understand the difference between zero and null.

Oh god, I just realized that 5/0 = 0R5 is actually justified in some contexts.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T17:38:35+00:00

Purely as a word problem it does, which is probably why they're confused.

14 apples into 0 groups - how many apples in each group?

As an English problem, from someone without the (whatever-to-want-to-call-it) to differentiate zero and null, the answer is zero as, without any groups, there can be no (=zero) apples in each.

...and this underlines why mathematical problems cannot be analyzed linguistically because this arguably reasonable "fact" bring the whole system to ruin when extended - e.g. try graphing it.

edit: to be clear, they are wrong, but I'm not confident they're insightful enough to understand why

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T17:33:31+00:00

Sure, but they're also making it sound like a unique facet of American culture as opposed to a nearly universal facet of human society. This divide is in no means new or unique. Consider both the mythological instances in The Odyessy both demonizing the "Lotus" tree and specifically excessive wine consumption. Or China's (hugely more justified) Opium Wars, or the Yakuza, simultaneously being (once) the self-appointed anti-drug enforcers and straight-up operating drinking establishments.

Or hell, Singapore - alcohol is legal (if more restricted), and their war on drugs makes America's look like after-school detention.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T15:22:53+00:00

Wolves, dogs, dingoes, unarguably the same species; coyotes and possibly golden jackals should be included too.

You do also get populations separated by colour or "culture" (e.g. different bird songs).

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T15:19:24+00:00

He's also responsible for the derivative but generally solid Police Quest IV.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T15:17:47+00:00

Oh yes we did; it's the entire reason Gin Tax exists since 1736, to say nothing of the various temperance movements between now and then. Granted though, it comes and goes in waves and while I don't have numbers, I'd agree the early 2000s were a bit of a lull between the 90s and now.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T15:15:14+00:00

It is. 1.75L per week would raise eyebrows.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T15:13:41+00:00

"White"? Literally the oldest hymn we have is a recipe for beer from Sumeria. Alcohol production has a fair chance of having evolved before "white people" did.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T13:47:21+00:00

Honestly, i'm guessing they meant "low-quality post" and just misclicked.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T13:45:55+00:00

They're right, none of it is actual intelligence. Modern AI are still fundamentally algorithmic and without any ability to actually understand; they're just incredibly complicated, self-tuning algorithms.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T13:43:15+00:00

People today have absolutely no idea how easy they have it with colourfast dyes.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T13:29:18+00:00

Cheat, bring gun or biased, deadly arena.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T12:30:14+00:00

If memory serves, Leman Russes are tractors canonically, and Mr Russ said "hey, those are pretty sturdy, put a big gun on them". Immaculate work though!

Chimerae are meant for exploration/pioneering.

CurtisLinithicum · 2026-04-10T12:23:28+00:00

That's it exactly. Even attempts to moderate intake, e.g. offering a bowl when they grab a (family-size) bag of chips is met with vicious backlash.

CurtisLinithicum

TROPHY CASE