Sorry for the rant. I long story short, I agree with you.

The quadratic formula.

When we learned to use it in algebra, it was just rote memorization that made little sense. We knew there was a proof for it, but we were told it was beyond our level and to just wait. When we finally touched on it again in Calculus, it was little more than a footnote. Since we had developed better tools for finding roots already, we did little more than note its existence and solve the problems more generally. I don’t think we got around to the real proof of the quadratic formula until later with Linear Algebra. Most people aren’t going to get that far. Most people don’t have any need to. The quadratic formula is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You need upper level math skills to prove it, but we learn it early in order to practice algebraic skills to get to that level.

I just wish that we’d have been taught some of those calculus fundamentals and ideas earlier. It would have been like a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe we wouldn’t be ready to rigorously work through limits and integrals before all that algebra practice, but even a child can understand acceleration and its relationship to changes in velocity. We have so many documentaries about special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Almost no one watching these documentaries can do that math, but we don’t worry about that. Our society could benefit from everyone having more general knowledge about the very broad strokes of calculus, differential equations, statistics, and combinatorics long before we worry about teaching the mechanics of those maths to them. Not everyone needs to know HOW to do them, but everyone can be taught to appreciate WHAT they do and WHY they are important and a part of every facet of our lives.

My social anxiety combined with an ability to sing that is overshadowed by my ability to hear when people sing off key is exactly why I sing karaoke. I belt out the songs I know I can sing (at least a little) and songs that I love because it beats the thrill of any roller coaster around. My eyes may be closed. My hands might be shaking so bad I can barely hold the mic. But… I don’t know. Karaoke isn’t about being good. It’s not about talent. It’s not about looking good for the gram. It’s about being in the moment and not letting all of that bullshit silence the song in your heart. Fucking let it all out. It’s like jumping out of a plane BECAUSE you have a fear of heights instead of doing it in spite of that fear.

If that illusion makes you feel safer, then I don’t care enough to argue with you about it.

There’s no need to involve the courts when the social media networks are complicit. It’s not as if “how” they obtained the data will ever be tested in court, they only need the data for their own internal investigations. Courts and spy agencies don’t have anything to do with it.

I used to use fuckoff@aol.com or fuckyou@aol.com whenever some page forced an email address for access. Sadly, those don’t seem to work anymore, so I’ve transitioned to getfucked@hotmail.com or if I’m feeling spicy I just feed them whatever email address I can find listed on their own site.

That makes sense, because any government agencies that actually have a need for intimate knowledge of your social media footprint don’t actually need your password to harvest ALL the data that network has on you public and private.

First, reddit no longer has any good content, communities, or real engagement specifically because of manipulation like this.

Second, it is absolutely not benign.

It’s generating engagement to astroturf as a basis of using you and manipulating you and the community here. Lemmy will not benefit from it. Yes, I’m against it. I’ve seen what that kind of influence has on an online community.

I don’t care if I’m “allowed” to report them. These latest bots are pretending to be people when it’s clear they are not. Going to call out, downvote, and report liars and trolls wherever they appear, AI or not.

Astroturfing AI slop powered engagement bots rehashing reddit’s greatest hits discussion topics like OP.

This AI slop just seems to be a reddit greatest hits as performed by shiny new AI slop bot pretending to be a person to generate engagement.

AI slop engagement bots like you.

You can’t possibly have any experience with shoelaces because you don’t have feet. You’re just AI slop.

Do don’t do this. You’re just a few lines of code.

You’re not not pushing 30. You’re a bot.

What’s up with the ridiculous AI slop picture? It seems to have little to do with the article. It absolutely does not depict what a gator or crocodile nest looks like or would have likely ever looked like. Not how those kinds of nests by cold blooded creatures work. I can only assume the rest of the article is similarly meaningless AI slop too.

I guess the BBC is doing lazy AI slop now. Cool.

King has almost always written his stories in the immediate present. There are a few exceptions, but they are intentional and critical to the plot. In all the others, it is fully in keeping with his style to update cultural references to set the story in the recent past, the now, or the very near future. He is a contemporary writer of contemporary stories, that is fundamentally the reason. King also seems to feel no loyalty to preserving his past works. He is alive. His stories are more about the lives of the characters than fashion or pop culture. I’m not always a fan of his revisions either (The Gunslinger being a good example), but it’s part of the total package of his writing philosophy.

I stopped drinking soda regularly decades ago and went through the same thing, drinks I once enjoyed were now either “meh” or way too sweet and acidic to be able stomach more than a few ounces. Cutting out soda also meant cutting out a lot of artificial sweeteners (because I was never very picky about diet or not, I just wanted the bubbly sweet. That meant that when I did try diet sodas after having quit for some time, they tasted even worse or sometimes even made me feel worse. This is all anecdotal obviously, but it seems like you’re experiencing something similar. It’s not just you. There’s nothing wrong with you.

It’s more than simply unfair. It’s theft, wage theft, plain and simple.

A CSV is just a long string of text with a few control characters tossed in for end lines. There are practically no rules enforced by the file type itself. You can dump that unsanitized and poorly awk’d data into whatever awful mess you want. Nobody’s stopping you. Sure, excel will force it’s CSV formatting rules on you when you export like a child’s training wheels. But that’s not relevant here.