Really good series. I was particularly happy to see Amy Acker get a juicy long-running role after getting screwed in Dollhouse.

I’m going to throw out 2 series that were canceled early that I’m still salty about: The River that was on track to rival Lost in quality, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles which is another case where Summer Glau got screwed. Lena Heady has said if SCC didn’t get canceled, she wouldn’t have gotten Game of Thrones, which hits a lot different now than 10 years ago when GoT was good.

I always thought that Stargate: Universe was a Firefly situation. Maybe it was a touch below Battlestar Galactica, but it’s not ludicrous to mention them in the same sentence.

There’s a good one in Cantonese I learned from Hong Kong movies. It translates to “Are you talking?” but the implication is “You’re making noise, but is that supposed to be human speech?” Lei guuung yeieh!?

The first/only small town in Norway with crazy tourism that comes to mind is Tromsø. If that’s the one, I don’t imagine it will ever change.

I started with a random Jeeves book and was immediately hooked. This blogger put some thought into it: https://honoriaplum.wordpress.com/2014/08/10/getting-started-with-bertie-and-jeeves-a-chronological-challenge/?wref=tp

I would say Joy in the Morning has one of my favorite sentences in the English language, describing a fellow who is startled by an intruder while he’s feeling a bit embarrassed.

At the time he died, I’d been a fan of Douglas Adams for about 25 years. After he died, they released a collection of essays, works in progress, notes and such. In it, he described the amazement he had for his favorite author, who he described as having an amazing way with words. The guy that amazed me with “It flew in much the same way a brick doesn’t.” was amazed by someone else’s way with words. So, I put down Salmon, walked to the nearest bookshop, and bought a couple of volumes by P.G. ( if I may call him that) Wodehouse and began a new era of fandom that rivals my adoration of dear old Doug.

I’ve had a nagging issue with ChatGPT that hasn’t been easy for me to explain. I think I’ve got it now.

We’re used to computers being great at remembering “state.” For example, if I say “let x=3”, barring a bug, x is damned well gonna stay 3 until I decide otherwise.

GPT has trouble remembering state. Here’s an analogy:

Let Fred be a dinosaur.
Ok, Fred is a dinosaur.
He’s wearing an AC/DC tshirt.
OK, he’s wearing an AC/DC tshirt.
And sunglasses.
OK, he’s wearing an AC/DC tshirt and sunglasses.
Describe Fred.
Fred is a kitten wearing an AC/DC tshirt and sunglasses.

When I work with GPT, I spend a lot of time reminding it that Fred was a dinosaur.

Yesterday I was working on a training PowerPoint and it occurred to me that I should probably simplify the language. Had GPT convert it to 3rd-grade language, and it worked pretty well. Not perfect, but it helped.

I’m also writing an app as a hobby and, although GPT goes batshit crazy from time to time, overall it has done most of the coding grunt-work pretty well.

School board is the lowest level of government that I’ve observed narcissistic nazi psychopaths. Well, the lady at the counter at the driver’s license place, too. But she’s not elected.

ddp

Bwahaha! I have stolen your comment!

The potato comment reminded me that I learned about Polandball through Reddit, which was a lot of fun. Reddit also taught me that I can read more Dutch than I had any right to expect, which has provided hundreds of hours of hobby fun-time enjoyment.

I’ve been using kbin and startrek.website’s lemmy instance since the blackout. Kbin had server issues the first few days, but has been dead solid - with the exception of the occasional upvote bug a few people mentioned - ever since. The lemmy instance has worked great. There were some usability improvements sorted out in 18.1 a few weeks ago (mainly the ability to sort by top articles from the last 3, 6, 12 hours) that helped it a lot.

I get the disintegration qualms. But slap some TNG-era biofilters on that baby and filter out heavy metal accumulations, budding cancer cells, chest congestion, etc., and I’d be first in line.

Assuming that pushing it up and pulling it back down doesn’t work, and the track is clear of obstructions…

There’s a help (roadside assistance?) phone number in the little receipt packet they gave you.

I was pondering about a Mastodon/Kbin issue this morning and the first 10 google hits were on r/kbinmigration :[

In 2004, I was working on the bridge of a ship that was going to be inspected in a few days. There was a small hole in a wall about the size of an electrical outlet with exposed wiring that I wanted to hide from the inspectors. I printed out a picture of a kitten and taped it over the hole. I visited the ship again in 2018, and the kitten was still there.

Iirc, you got an invite to Eternity Club if you posted something that hit #1 on r/all/top. Most active topic was Selfie Sunday.

I think there will be another surge on July 1 when 3rd party apps go offline. As submissions, activity, and moderation on reddit decline, it could lead to a larger stream of users leaving the platform and looking for an alternative. Fleshing out content and functionality in the fediverse before in advance of Reddit’s death spiral feels important.

This is the thing for me. I think I’m experiencing a bit of news FOMO. Reddit has been reliable for years at supplying news, cat antics, and pretty girls. I also agree that google+reddit has been really useful in solving very specific problems.