This is one of the weirdest of several weird things about the people who are marketing AI right now

I went to ChatGPT right now and one of the auto prompts it has is “Message to comfort a friend”

If I was in some sort of distress and someone sent me a comforting message and I later found out they had ChatGPT write the message for them I think I would abandon the friendship as a pointless endeavor

What world do these people live in where they’re like “I wish AI would write meaningful messages to my friends for me, so I didn’t have to”

RealPage is one of the great unrecognized villains of the modern age.

Fun story, a few years back I caught my landlord overbilling me on utilities. I said hey I did the math and you owe me back $X and I'm not paying any more utilities until that amount I'd been overpaying has been used up. My landlord used Realpage for billing, and Realpage said no that's not how it works, we'll get it corrected but you need to keep paying what's in the system or you'll be delinquent. I said go fuck yourself, I have no reason to trust that you and the landlord will adjust it accurately if I give you more money, I'm not obligated to wait until your system figures it out, your system is your problem, not mine. I plan to pay amounts I actually owe and not amounts I don't. They said you really have to. I said hey check it out I think I don't, let's see which one of us is right.

We went back and forth about it for quite some time, including me telling my bank not to accept withdrawals from RealPage (since they started charging me even with emails expressly explaining that they were not authorized to), which made them even more irritated at me and charging me extra fees. I said dude I am more than happy to explain this all to a judge if you want to go that route. They said you really have to pay though, we've worked out the overbill and corrected it but you still have late and returned-payment fees. I said we went over this, go fuck yourself, did I stutter.

When I moved out my landlord tried to not give me back my security deposit until RealPage was happy with my utilities balance. I waited 31 days and then sent them a formal notice that if they didn't return my security deposit I was within my rights to take them to court and get paid triple and planned to do so in 7 days. They said it had all been a big misunderstanding and was there really a need for all this and gave me back my security deposit.

Just talking about it now again makes me amped-up and irritated.

Biden aimed a lot closer to the yellow line than he got; the fact he was able to achieve legislation for the blue line in our current corporate-whore government is a goddamned miracle

And yet somehow, instead of being mad at the elements of our government that blocked the yellow line, or asking who in government we can promote who’s further left than Biden and how we can realistically get those people into a position to win power, some people are purely angry at Biden about it

I wonder why

A guy came into the ER with a teacup up his ass.

The doctor asked how it happened.

The doctor said, in the writing where I was reading about this whole event: “What followed was a long and startling story that I immediately regretted asking for.”

“This year we selected leaders in different fields. We honored men for the first time. We thought RBG’s teachings regarding equality should be practiced. We did not consider politics,” Julie Opperman, the chairperson of the org, said in a statement. “Instead, we focused on leaders, who, in their own way, have made significant contributions to society.”

I actually don't think that the issue was that it was being given to men. I think the issue was that if you think Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch (!) are the people that Ruth Bader Ginsberg would have wanted to honor, someone needs to maroon you on an island somewhere all alone where you can't infect the others.

Honestly? If you’re still on Twitter at this point, that’s on you.

Dude fuckin charge him

It's a violation of federal law? Go arrest him. Let people who served with the people buried nearby serve the warrant. Let him sit in custody until he explains to a judge why he should be free.

Fuck him. You don't have to charge him with anything above and beyond what happened, but just stop treating him special. Oh, go after the campaign staff who laid hands on the official, too. Pretty sure that's a felony in most jurisdictions.

There’s not a thing wrong with wanting a traditional family and traditional gender role life. A lot of people want that and life doesn’t have to be super complicated to be rewarding.

When you start spending all your time on the internet making monetized content about it and deliberately choosing to engage with the absolute worst people on the internet is where it becomes a suspect thing where the behavior doesn’t match the stated goal

I should fuckin well hope so

100% the same

Dude I've never been so happy to be wrong as fuck

local pastor and outspoken Israel advocate

Anne Frank’s diary

Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust graphic memoir

…

Israel advocate

Anne Frank’s diary

Israel advocate

Anne Frank’s diary

You fucking disgrace

Get out of my country

For some reason this made me way more irrationally angry than just killing Palestinians. It’s killing Palestinians and running cover for the people who killed Anne Frank and Spiegelman’s brother, and doing it all at the exact same time with no sense of shame or embarrassment but, I’m sure, a smug sense of superiority like everyone else is the monster in this

This guy better really hope that there isn’t a hell

Kaplan continued: “He came back in and he said, ‘Well, how’d you like the lunch?’ And I said, ‘Well, sir, I had a banana. You know, I can never really eat when I’m taking testimony.’ And he said, ‘Well, I told you,’ — it was kind of charming. He said, ‘I told you, I told them to make you really bad sandwiches, but they can’t help themselves here. We have the best sandwiches.’”

1. "I told them to make you really bad sandwiches." He literally sounds like a toddler
2. She was wise not to eat sandwiches, I think

And 30+% union membership

And houses that cost 4x median income

And shooting Nazis

Trump is clearly a moron with some kind of clinical brain dysfunction, but this is just like 2 seconds of fumbling with words, which pretty much anyone who does public speaking can do. I was expecting more than like 2 second's worth based on how big a deal the story sounded like.

IDK, maybe Newsweek is trying to run cover for him by running a big non-story about something innocuous to distract from the Nikki Haley / Nancy Pelosi thing.

The listed excerpts are actually quite tame compared to what the actual plan is.

slashing U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) funding, dismantling the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security

invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement and directing the DOJ to pursue Trump adversaries

create a federally funded "American Academy" that would deliver online courses and grant free degrees that excluded "wokeness or jihadism". The plan would also be funded by taxing the endowments of major universities

every state report exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother's state of residence, and by what method

I stopped looking, not because there was any shortage of further crazy shit. There’s plenty more.

Why is this not sedition?

Working in tech support be like

Bro you should have investigated the actual answer to this question before asking it publicly 😃

It's not to say you're watching lots of soft core porn but the algorithm has definitely decided that you'll like it

Just to put some context:

• Predatory scorpions a couple feet long
• Armored millipedes larger than a man; they were probably herbivorous but as the article notes they "would have had few, if any, predators."
• There is a theory, possibly not real well accepted but it makes sense to me, that trilobites were the creature that way-back-when invented effective predation shortly after evolving vision. (Before which the world was a fairly benign place.) The theory further supposes that the Cambrian Explosion was caused by every other organism on the planet having to scramble not to have their soft blobby flesh munched on at leisure by a limitless army of armored, invulnerable hunters, which they couldn't see or avoid, but who could see and follow them.

Whoever designed this with its implicit assumption that the cat won't then proceed onto the table has never met a cat.