How long was Prince “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”?

For about seven years, and then he went back to calling himself Prince again.

“How do I help my uncle Jack off a horse?”

Instead of store hours like this:

• Monday 6:00-18:00
• Tuesday 6:00-18:00
• Wednesday 8:00-18:00
• Thursday 6:00-18:00
• Friday 6:00-18:00

We can have store hours like this:

• Sunday 22:00-Monday 10:00
• Monday 22:00-Tuesday 10:00
• Wednesday 0:00-10:00
• Wednesday 22:00-Thursday 10:00
• Thursday 22:00- Friday 10:00

Boy, I would love to live in a place where store hours would be like this. So convenient.

And I’d love to have the change in the day be sometime in the middle of the day so that “see you tomorrow” means sometime later in the day. Or maybe different areas would use different conventions to refer to the time when the sun is out and most people are doing things and the time when most people are asleep.

It would also be so pleasant and relaxing to visit a new country and constantly have to calculate the country’s time offset in my head. There would probably be an app on my phone that I would constantly look at that would convert the time where I am to the equivalent time I am used to. I won’t have a sense of when meals are or when I should expect stores to be open, or when it’s reasonable to wake up without converting to the time I’m used to. Some might say the thing I’m used to is my time “zone”.

It would also be great for TV shows and books to always run into issues when talking about the time because there’s no universal reference.

Even the actual convenience of scheduling a meeting with people in different parts of the world has issues. Now, you know that whatever time you say is the time for all people. But instead of being able to just look up each person’s time zone and see “oh, it would be 3am there, so they’d be asleep”, you’d have to go to some website that tells you what time most people sleep or what time most people eat meals, or whatever, and see by how many hours it differs.

I think that electing someone as deranged as Trump — who basically would try anything and everything that a sane person wouldn’t risk out of self-preservation, we basically saw a speedrun of finding out all the weaknesses and exploits of our government, combined with proving that impeachment and removal is basically impossible as long as one party is in collusion with the president.

We might have gotten here anyway, but it might have been a decade or two rather than four short years.

And the Supreme Court wouldn’t look like it does and be doing what’s it’s doing, which is also now a speedrun of horror.

I’ll never forgive Americans for 2016.

Ubermeets

At my first developer job 25 years ago, any time we made a change in the code we had to add a comment at the end of each modified line with our initials and the date, because we had no version control.

If you mean that Pennsylvania Dutch is a dialect of German and that Dutch and Deutsch share a common origin, then that is true.

It’s because Germany wasn’t a unified place until not that long ago, so different neighbors came up with their own way to refer to them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany

In a version that doesn’t even fully make sense. With databases there is a well-defined way to sanitize your inputs so arbitrary commands can’t be run like in the xkcd comic. But with AI it’s not even clear how to avoid all of these kinds of problems, so the chiding at the end doesn’t really make sense. If anything the person should be saying “I hope you learned not to use AI for this”.

You’re saying “vote for my guy or else” and then acting like it’s my fault hostage takers are going to execute me.

I did not say who to vote for or even that you should vote. I only made the point that it’s the people’s responsibility to educate themselves on what is possible and the best course of action. (Then when you said you hated the country I asked if that includes the people.)

But also, that’s complicated by the fact that America is a blight on the world. The world would literally be better off if this shit hole declines because it can’t fuck with everyone else in the world anymore.

This is embarrassingly naive. Do you think if the US gets turned upside down — aside from the people living there who don’t deserve to suffer — do you think that the US is going to just tuck away in a corner and the world will be a better place? It would take decades and an incredible amount of suffering before you’d have a US that could not fuck with anyone anymore. If you want to see a former superpower in decline, just take a look at Russia. The more they decline, the more they lash out. The more Putin consolidates power, the more suffering that is caused by the whims of a desperate madman.

You’re deluding yourself because you desperately don’t want the options you see ahead of you to be the only options. I don’t like the options either. But there’s no magical way to have the US get better fast or go away fast.

You make whatever choice you want. But at least try to be rational about it.

It’s called living in a society, my dude

Does that hatred include all the people who are affected by the consequences of our elections?

If the person who is better for the country loses then it is all of our faults. In a democracy it’s up to the citizens to know the candidates, understand the system and what people can and can’t do, understand how the election system works, and be aware of what the stakes are.

Political campaigns attempt to hold your hand and pull you in a certain direction because it’s in their best interest to do so, but the blame for what happens in January 2025 rests with all of us.

Neither can ChatGPT

I feel like I’m the only person who loved Clerks and did not enjoy Clerks 2 at all

You’re saying that trying to motivate people positively to move on from meat is “push the blame away” behavior. But I think tut-tutting individuals who eat meat is pushing the blame away.

While there are some people who believe that eating meat is an absolute moral wrong no matter where or when it takes place in human history, a lot of people who feel eating meat is immoral feel this way because of what the meat industry does, both to the animals and to the planet. Five thousand years ago, people weren’t supporting the meat industry and all its wrongs by eating meat.

So considering it to be pathetic to try to effect real reduction in people’s meat consumption because the methods shift blame away from the individual meat eater seems really ironic to me, as well as completely counterproductive, if your goal is less meat consumption in the world.

If they looked exactly alike it wouldn’t even be interesting. You could just photograph actual twins

Laughter can’t melt steel beams!

This thread is starting to remind me of this

The worst version of this I’ve ever seen is a site that enforced a password policy on the “current password” field on the “change password” interface. I had an existing password that violated their policy (either because they changed the policy or a technician created a “temporary” password for me, I forget), and I could not change it to a proper password because my current password would get rejected.