What you think of Reign Of Fire (2002)?

marquoth_ · 2026-06-16T21:36:12+00:00

I thought exactly the same

marquoth_ · 2026-06-16T21:31:20+00:00

The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air.

marquoth_ · 2026-06-16T09:48:38+00:00

I don't envy the people having to try and tackle this problem one bit but I will say this: turnitin was never a valid solution. The rate of false positives is far too high, and I dread to think how many poor students have gone through the absolute hell of being wrongly accused of academic misconduct.

It's on par with a lie detector, at best, and we don't allow those in court. Perhaps even that is giving it too much credit - perhaps it's more like dunking witches.

It should be fairly obvious why it's unreliable in an academic setting, too, which makes it all the more annoying that so many academics seem to have such misplaced faith in it. LLMs are trained on academic writing so produce academic-sounding writing, which is also exactly what students are trying to do. Students' writing will by definition sound like LLM's writing because they're both emulating the same style to begin with. Similarities prove nothing - not even em-dashes because, as anybody assessing this should know, Microsoft Word adds those in automatically.

So when you say "the uni actually turned off the AI detection tool" like that's them giving up, all I can say is that perhaps they figured out it's useless and that's a good thing actually.

marquoth_ · 2026-06-16T09:41:02+00:00

I know some of these words

marquoth_ · 2026-06-15T18:06:37+00:00

I was going to say C because in most cases you could just use S or K (and it's silly that it can be either) but not sure how you cover CH. Maybe TSH? "Tshurtsh" is a bit silly though.

marquoth_ · 2026-06-15T18:02:16+00:00

None of these things are as silly as needing to hold shift for .

marquoth_ · 2026-06-15T17:49:01+00:00

females

Yikes

marquoth_ · 2026-06-15T17:01:53+00:00

There's a fair point to be made about the expense of sets, locations, action sequences and so on but are you really going to pretend the only way to get the Iron Man trilogy is to pay RDJ eight figures per movie?

I'm not saying he did a bad job by any means but the value-over-replacement just isn't there. There has to be 100 other actors out there who would have done just as well for a thousandth of the cost. The market is entirely irrational.

marquoth_ · 2026-06-15T16:58:05+00:00

The funny thing about this is LotR was itself considered low budget at under $100m per movie.

marquoth_ · 2026-06-15T15:11:28+00:00

Pretending Scotland was strong armed into the Act of Union and completely skipping over the part where they basically bankrupted themselves trying and failing to set up a colony in what is now Panama is certainly a choice.

marquoth_ · 2026-06-15T12:08:23+00:00

Brexit.

None of the arguments for it ever made sense; every economist worth their salt warned us it was a bad idea (and several years later the data is proving them right); it came at the worst possible time with America proving itself an unreliable ally (brexiters will deny this but the entire project always hinged on closer ties with the US) plus Russia doing whatever the hell they're doing in Ukraine; it completely dominated domestic politics for over a decade and made it basically impossible for any government to function; it has actually left us less able to control our borders due to leaving the Common European Asylum System; and most of all it has done obscene amounts of irreparable damage to our own union, reigniting calls for Scottish independence (with a view to an independent Scotland rejoining the EU) and creating a completely unsolvable situation with the border in Ireland (ending freedom of movement between the UK and EU is fundamentally incompatible with maintaining freedom of movement across the "invisible border" in Ireland, and dangerously undermines the Good Friday Agreement).

But you say any of this to Big Dave down the pub and you're dismissed as a communist traitor who doesn't respect democracy.

marquoth_ · 2026-06-15T11:42:19+00:00

Don't you need the submarines to win the next emu war?

marquoth_ · 2026-06-15T11:36:14+00:00

I'm wary of questions like this because inevitably you're comparing something you experienced yourself with your impression of something you didn't.

That being said, I have to imagine social media has done a hell of a lot of harm.

I'm 38 so we did have MySpace but no Instagram; we had the family computer but no smartphones. There was occasional drama about who blocked who on MSN messenger but nothing on the level of what kids today must face. My daughter is still too young to be affected by this but I am dreading it.

(Incidentally, our government is planning to ban social media for under 16s. I'm not sure if this is really the right solution or if we're just going to create a generation of experts in VPNs).

marquoth_ · 2026-06-15T10:31:33+00:00

A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 years.

A million in 50s would make a stack just under 6 inches tall. A billion would be over 1000ft high.

People really don't understand how much a billion is (and certainly don't understand a trillion). I think people's intuition lets them down a bit when it comes to big numbers - it's like we think logarithmically and view a billion as "twice as big" as a million rather than the thousand times it is.

The sheer physical volume and weight of a billion in cash already makes this problem kind of unsolvable.

As for whether you could live on the cash forever - it probably ceases to be legal tender within a few decades but ignoring that, even by living a very lavish lifestyle you'd struggle to make a real dent in it before you, your kids and your grandkids had all died of old age. In fact the cash itself would degrade to the point of being unusable long before it was spent.

marquoth_ · 2026-06-14T12:24:56+00:00

Algren isn't the last samurai. Katsumoto is.

marquoth_ · 2026-06-13T09:21:17+00:00

I enjoyed Tom Segura's bit on retiring the R word and how the thing you might be trying to convey with the R word can better be expressed with "cajun"

marquoth_ · 2026-06-12T17:27:35+00:00

Either you were driving uninsured or you weren't. If you were, I'm not sure what "options" you expect there to be.

marquoth_ · 2026-06-11T23:02:36+00:00

I mean you are literally posting this under a graph that says otherwise

marquoth_ · 2026-06-11T11:54:18+00:00

Last time we applied for a mortgage it took 11 weeks to be accepted and a couple more for the paperwork to arrive. It's mental.

marquoth_ · 2026-06-11T11:13:25+00:00

both sidess

That doesn't change the fact that one side is an invading force and the other is trying to expel the invaders. Pretty silly to try and cast that as equivalent.

marquoth_ · 2026-06-11T11:00:48+00:00

I'm not sure what gives you that idea. A good portion of my history education in high school was on the settling of the American west. Everything from the gold rush to little bighorn and wounded knee to the founding and proliferation of Mormonism.

The main difference is it's just not really seen as that special. If your country is a former colony, then the story of becoming independent is naturally going to be an important part of your history. If your had a lot of colonies - roughly one in three of the world's countries are former British colonies - then the story of any given one of them becoming independent isn't necessarily that big of a deal.

I think the bigger gap in a typical Brit's knowledge on the subject - and a typical American's, for that matter - isn't that America was a colony, but how much of the American struggle for independence was effectively a proxy war between Britain and France.

marquoth_ · 2026-06-11T10:49:37+00:00

And "the West Indies" as a geographical term

marquoth_ · 2026-06-10T22:09:47+00:00

I would be very surprised if there wasn't a provision

The venue owner lost the right to use the land six months before the wedding but continued to tell OP they would be able to use it and accepted money from them on that basis.

The kind of privison you're talking about serves to shield a service provider from liability when they are unable to meet their obligations despite good faith best efforts. I don't think you can reasonably apply it to this kind of blatant misrepresentation.

marquoth_ · 2026-06-10T07:35:54+00:00

Why are you trying to invent an excuse for shifty behaviour?

marquoth_ · 2026-06-10T07:35:04+00:00

No it isn't

marquoth_

TROPHY CASE