I could very well be wrong, I know little about birds, but wouldn’t this just scare the shit out of the bird?

I must admit, even though he was down in the polls, I still expected him to win somehow. It gives me a little glimmer of hope that the world may not become an authoritarian hellscape.

Did they shoot it with a shotgun?

There was a soda machine a few feet from the TSA line. I bought one and noticed the agent looking my way. I walked up to them within a minute (small airport) and they took my unopened Coke, that they watched me purchase, and threw it in the trash. It was a dollar more at the machine on the other side.

This was a while back when the TSA was a new concept. I had no idea you couldn’t carry a closed bottle of soda through the checkpoint and was very irritated at the lack of common sense.

Another item I didn’t have confiscated but did create a big stir with was a bullet on a keychain. It contains some of my dad’s ashes. I put my keys with the keychain in the basket and several agents were shaking it saying “there is something inside there” they took me aside and I explained it was my Dad and they dropped it like a hot rock and apologized. I was surprised by that reaction given my soda experience.

I may have become too cynical but, as is often the case when you dig deeper, this sounds like the result of lobbyists trying to protect licensing rather than people.

We can be dumb, but we’ve been doing web searches for legal and medical advice for ages because it is too damned expensive and time consuming to go to professionals for every little thing. Not to mention, doctors have so little time for you that it is hard to get them to listen to the whole story to make connections between symptoms.

The LLMs already tell you that they aren’t licensed professionals and, for many, provide citations for their sources (miles better than your typical health website).

As a personal anecdote, my son was having stomach pain but was planning to tough it out. He checked with ChatGPT and it recommended he go to the ER. He did, and if he hadn’t, he would likely be dead now. He spent 3 days in the hospital having his bowels unobstructed through a tube in his nose.

There is value in people having that kind of information at their fingertips.

Regulation is absolutely needed, but I would rather they focus on protecting us from AI being used for military purposes, mass surveillance, etc. rather than protecting citizens from ourselves.

Weed will do that to you. Unfortunately becoming ripped is not a side effect.

Nah, let him stay here and try one of those fancy detention centers that he is so fond of. I’d hate to see our tax dollars go to waste.

If nothing else, maybe it will bring Epstein back into the news cycle.

It’s not exactly projecting because I would personally have a blast. But that’s largely because I would understand what is happening.

I doubt the height would scare the bird, like you said, they are used to that. What they probably aren’t used to is being confined while strapped to a drone they can’t control. That’s more like the experience of being picked off by a bird of prey. I would imagine birds enjoy flying free. This is not that.

This was a hit when I was in high school. That video creeped me out back then. Something about the foaming mouths and big eyes. Seems unremarkable to me now though.

Yeah, he is pretty tough. I wish I could hug him, he is about a 10 hour drive from me. That tube was nightmarish from what he’s told me.

That’s awful. I’d be really pissed off.

He’s in his 20s so he is only slightly more likely to take my advice than he was as a teenager 😆

I find it amusing and ironic that you couldn’t find it.

I was in awe at their bathrooms the first time I went to one.

That was a great read friend! It made me laugh at least twice.

I have about 20 years of experience in machine learning algorithms development.

I wish I had an argument that would change your mind because I could use such an argument for myself. I don’t think you are a doomer. This is our generation’s nuclear arms race but with more ways to go bad. This is taking place at a time when we need unity of mind and action but are going in the opposite direction at warp speed.

What I would like to know is not, “what is going to happen?” But “what are we going to do about it?”

Yeah, I’m in the US and I agree. Though it is going to take some serious change to treat the problem. In the meantime, this is at least a stopgap solution for people who don’t have a lot of options.

They have the capabilities, but to be good at it you need good prompts and setup. Some companies are simply using the big platforms with custom data and prompts to get better answers than someone untrained in the subject would.

There are also open source models that you can download and train yourself. They don’t have to be as full featured and all knowing as something like Claude or ChatGPT and, in theory, can be made better at a niche thing than the bigger, more general models.

Sober for 13 years and I’ve led a number of sobriety support groups. I so wish I could tell you something you could do that will stop the drinking.

But, in my experience, the only way a person can overcome their demons is to do it for themselves. Your dad may really want to do what he can to stop for you or someone else he loves, but that requires a level of emotional and psychological effort that it is impossible to sustain.

Overcoming an addiction wears you down. It just takes one bad thing to happen in a weak moment when you are all out of willpower to fall back into the same old patterns.

If it’s safe, you should definitely tell him how you feel about his drinking and the way his drinking affects you. Whether that triggers him to change or not, that is something you need to say and he needs to hear.

When he is ready, a support group can be extremely helpful. A small thing you could do would be to put a list together of local places that have that kind of thing.

I’m sorry you are going through this. The most important thing for you to do is to take care of yourself. Hang in there!