I know several people who have had cochlear implants since childhood who are all young adults now. None have regretted it, nor have their parents. I know this is a major issue in Deaf culture with a capital-D, but if the rest of the family has normal hearing this seems like a no-brainer these days. The surgery is well tolerated by almost everyone and the younger you do it the easier the transition period is.

The amazing thing about this is that The Onion could literally repost most old Infowars headlines as-is since they were already usually the kind of absurd nonsense that hardworking Onion writers normally have to think up themselves.

I’m specifically using Voyager on iOS and MacOS (and in Windows via BlueStacks) because I do exactly this. I block several whole instances (lemmygrad and hexbear), the active politics communities, and also specific keywords (elon, musk, trump, gop, republican, etc.), so I’m even able to browse All without my eyeballs being seared.

I moved to Florida specifically so that I could live at the beach. Go to Hawaii.

Dec/Jan is the Florida high season, so everything is crowded and accommodations will be pricey. If your vacation truly is in Jan though, Hawaii will actually be quiet (end of December is super crowded tho).

If you do go to Florida, look at Naples up to Tampa on the gulf coast, or key west. The people are much nicer than Floridians on the east coast

he aged

Air. Can’t go more than a minute or two without it, and there’s enough to share!

How the fuck is this still a tight race? I just for the life of me cannot understand (I mean, I can, but… I just can’t).

Shocked that Florida made it to double digits.

(sent, with love, from Florida)

Is that pedal set up up to drive the machine, or is it just for looks?

I spent my childhood in Brooklyn (just a bridge away from Manhattan) just before the internet was a thing, and it seems pretty normal relative to what friends from other places describe. In fact, better in some ways. It was always easy to get a group of kids together to do whatever. We had pickup baseball (usually stickball), basketball, hide-and-seek and other games. There were 2 nice parks and several pocket parks in easy walking distance. Most of us had and rode bikes everywhere. A lot of my friends went to different schools (because of the density you might walk 3 blocks to the elementary school north of you, or 4 to the one south), so there were always new pools of people to interact with.

Though I moved away my sister still lives there and has kids of her own, and it seems pretty much the same now as it was then. Since the density of the place hasn’t changed too much it actually seems more the same than where I live now, which has significantly changed in terms of population and traffic (and is heavily car-dependent) in just the last 15 years.

wasn’t there some research recently that said that like 20% of what your brain does was actually controlled by your gut microbiota?

The critical thing to remember about LLMs is that they are probabilistic in nature. They don’t know facts, they don’t reason, they don’t evaluate. All they do is take your input string, split that string into tokens that are about 3-4 characters long, and then go back into their vast, vast, pretrained database and say “I have this series of tokens. In the past when similar sets of tokens were given, what were the tokens that were most likely to be associated with them?” It will then construct the output string one token at-a-time (more sophisticated models can do multiple tokens at once so that words, phrases and sentences might hang together better) until the output is complete (the probability of the next token being relevant drops below some threshold value) or your output limit is reached.

One of those liminal spaces. Love it.

Feel like the (totally impractical) fediverse end-game would be for each individual to have their own activitypub service, and federation happening on a person-by-person basis. So you retain some control over anything you publish, and your history is yours to keep.