Not the op, but an obvious example is that in any post covering current events, there are always half a dozen comments complaining about “late stage capitalism” or denouncing the elites. Those comments don’t really add anything to the discussion and kinda just reduce a thread to a boring whinge-fest.

This is not that funny but I was amused watching it happen. One time I was at the DMV in a college town and a kid was at the counter trying to get his license renewed. From what I could gather he had it revoked because he was underage and had a DUI. Lady at the counter bounced the kid and a few minutes later, the kid came back in with his father and they were apparently from a rich family. Or at least rich by Ohio standards. When the lady at the counter explained that he could not have his license renewed because he had a court order against him, the father started in on the “Do you know who I am? I will buy this whole town!” routine, but the DMV lady was not having any of it. Both the kid and the father insisted that the judge did not have any right to take his license away from him and that it would be over turned on appeal so the DMV lady had to give him his license, because dad would make sure she got fired if he didn’t. But the DMV lady would not relent and issue a license. The father and kid were getting pretty animated, so finally the lady picked up the phone and said something to the effect of “Your kid lied on this form and is probably violating his probation, we can call the court right now and see what your judge thinks about that.” Which at that point caused them to sheepishly leave. When I got to the counter she told me that was not the first time in her career someone tried to do that to her.

The day to day reality for me at least is that the new hyped up llms are largely useless for work and in some cases actually detriments. Some people at work use them a lot, but the heavy users tend to be people who were bad at their jobs, or at least bad at the communication aspect of their jobs. They were bad at communicating before and now, with the help of chat gpt, they are still bad at communicating, except they have gotten weirdly obstinate about their crappy work output.

Other folks I know have tried to use them to learn new things but gave up on them when they kept getting corrected by subject matter experts.

I played around with them for code generation but did not find it any faster than just writing and debugging my own code.

I suspect it is because he believes he can con Trump into giving him control over the entirety of NASAs budget

When bad people do good things they are generally seen as sinister, as if they are concealing a horrible action behind a facade of good will. So if you believe the government is fundamentally evil, and you see it trying to do something good (which is the whole purpose of FEMA) then its actions are going to look sinister to you. So stories about FEMA having camps (at their core, these are stories about the government using the facade of aid and assistance to hide something evil) will make sense to you because they are consistent with your sentiments about the what the government is. So too would stories about FEMA using disasters as a pretext for land snatching or stories about FEMA ignoring people in peril because these are all stories about an evil government. To the extent that they are consistent with your sentiments about the government, they are easy to accept as true, even if they contradict each other.

Former CEO of the river poisoning company says there is no way to meet our river poison reduction goals, so we might as well build bigger river poisoning machines because they might help us figure out how to stop poisoning the river. /s

I feel like there was a time when the tech folks in silicon valley had a lot of credibility, and we are now living in a period where most of the world sees them as a joke but that fact has not yet entered into the culture of silicon valley.

Used get my haircut at one of those “no appointment needed” haircut chains. Then they got an app, and every time I went it was “Why aren’t you using the app? You need to use the app. Next time use the app. Download the app on your phone. It’s gonna be an hour wait because you didn’t use the app.”

Now I just go to a local place.

I went to one for a candidate for the House district I lived in a few election cycles ago, It was mostly stump speeches and other “rah rah we’re gonna win!” style pontificating. But one thing I did not expect and I actually found interesting was the house candidate spent a lot of time introducing other local politicians that were in down ballot races in the district. City council seats, education board seats etc. That turned out to be really useful, because it meant I got to meet/ hear from candidates who I either had no idea existed or who were just a name of a flyer before then. I suppose that experience may not transfer to a national candidate rally though.

It’s the most recent common female ancestor of all humanity, as determined by mitochondrial DNA.

Or put another way. If everyone traced their family lines back through their mothers, mitochondrial eve would be the first point where all those lines converged on a single woman

Unhelpful Linux User Archetypes:

The Configurator: All problems are configuration problems. The fact that a user has a problem means they configured their machine incorrectly. All help requests are an opportunity to lecture others about configuration files.

The lumberjack: Insists on logs no matter how simple or basic the question. “How do I get the working directory in the terminal?” -Sorry, I can’t help you unless you post your log. “What does the -r flag do?” -You need to post a log for me to answer that question. “Is there a way to make this service start at boot?” -We have no way of knowing unless you post your log. When a user posts their log, the lumberjack’s work is done. No need to reply to the thread any further.

The Anacdata Troubleshooter: Failed to develop a theory of mind during childhood. Thinks their machine is representative of all machines. If they don’t have an issue, the user is lying about the issue.

The Jargon Master: Uses as much jargon as possible in forum posts. If a user doesn’t know each and every term, that’s on them. If you did not commit to mastering every aspect of a piece of software before asking for help, were you even trying to solve the problem?

The Hobby Horse Jockey: All problems are caused by whatever thing the contributor does not like. Graphics driver issue? Snaps. Computer won’t post? Obviously, Snaps. Machine getting too hot? Snaps. Command ‘flatpack’ not found? Oh you better believe snaps did that.

The Pedantfile: Gets mad because everyone asks their questions the wrong way. Writes a message letting the user know they asked their question wrong. Message usually appears within a minute or two of someone providing a solution to the user.