Last winter there was a question about why a freeze warning in the northern plains states didn’t apply to other states to the East and West. And people were like “well, the mountains…” this and “uh, the Mississippi…” that, but I couldn’t get over how “y’all, you’re missing the big thing here. It’s not weird that so few states have the same weather, it’s weird that so many do.”

If you put the US over Europe, with New Mexico over Portugal, Maine would be over Moscow. The contiguous 48 states is basically the same size as China. By itself, it’s bigger than three whole continents (not combined).

AI-powered AI detectors are rarely much better than chance.

Not standard. I’m running a stock Pixel and it’s never been an option. Some third party AOSP forks add it in, though.

Ooh, more for me then. Thanks!

Technically egg drop soup is a really wet chicken broth omelet.

ETTD has spread to his VP. You love to see it.

Nah, the Seffians treat Discworld with the same reverence that we treat Shakespeare. There’s a famous musician on Seffi who calls ximself Wind the Rince.

Plot twist: the Seffian’s name is Rickas’Tley

Some people are being a bit pedantic about not technically needing the internet for email, and that’s true, but the pedantry is hiding the fact that actually email is really cool in how it exists in whatever form we want it to be in! It can be transmitted over internet, or over bare TCP/IP, or even peer-to-peer. Most applications don’t take advantage of how versatile email really is.

Of course, Micro$oft makes it rely on an always-on internet connection because it’s better for their bottom line.

It is the year 2,002,026.

Humanity has conquered capitalism and moved off of Earth. Disease and accidental death have been eradicated. We’ve invented marvelous and miraculous technologies and used them to catapult ourselves to distant worlds.

It’s an open question whether or not our descendants can rightly call themselves “human” anymore, and indeed some on far-flung planets do not.

On the planet Seffi, which we call Kepler-725c, one of those human descendants watches the end of a two-dimensional audiovisual narrative, a recent fad on the planet. They aren’t watching it on a computer, per se, but on a holographic mesh device operating across a distributed cluster of nanomachines. The human descendant telepathically interfaced with it to launch the application and the narrative, and now xe marvels at how immersive and compelling the narrative was, despite being contained as it was within a two-dimensional non-interactive form.

A list of people who contributed to the construction of the narrative concludes its display, and the holomesh reverts to a waiting state, displaying a simple black panel within a white frame. And within that black panel, a small, orange-and-white triangle sits, perfectly centered. The human descendant doesn’t know what it originally represented, and muses briefly about it before deactivating the holomesh and walking out of xeir home to enjoy the sunset beneath the purple-blue trees.

Fun fact: it’s actually called “Maundy Thursday.” No, I don’t know what that means without looking it up.

I can’t believe he’s actually doing the meme, but with war.

That has been audited by third parties around the world. I detest Apple’s business practices, and even I know this ain’t it chief.

As far as I can see, you can’t really fear or rejoice with the results until you know the false positive/negative ratio.

This is what I was trying to figure out, too. I feel like this should be automatic.

Hey, it’s still rising, it’s just like 11am.

“Why’s it red then?” Uh…smog?

America really biffed it,

Pretty decent summary of American history, that. With few exceptions.

That’s disappointing, but good to know. Thanks.

Whoa, that’s very impressive! The only one you missed was “p10y,” which is in fact “particularly.” (“Practically” would be “p9y.”) But honestly that’s still amazing.

Oh!

Cool!

😬