“Improvement” is an open ended term. Would having longer or shorter toes be beneficial? Depends on the evolutionary environment.

ChatGPT does have a feedback loop. Every prompt you give it affects its internal state. That’s why it won’t give you the same response next time you give the same prompt. Will it be better or worse? Depends on what you want.

I’ve played with markov chains. They don’t create serious results, ever. ChatGPT is right just often enough for people to think it’s right all the time.

It’s for programmers who need their Imposter Syndrome amplified.

This is alright if you only know the basics of vim and then learn further from within that environment. If you’re already an intermediate to advanced user, then the keybindings between VSCode and Vim tend to interfere with each other. You’ll have to relearn how to do it.

I also started with GTA V in the last few years. I sometimes describe it as an interactive movie rather than a game.

That’s not meant to be insulting. It’s a very well told story with perfect social satire. The characters are excellent. If you judge it the way a movie is judged, it’s very good. The one thing is that the story should have finished with the big three-way shootout instead of Franklin’s choice. Otherwise, very well put together.

As a game, though, it’s mid. There are several mechanics where they teach you to do a thing, but it never comes up again. Money is no longer a limitation after the first heist is done. Owning a business isn’t likely to be profitable for the length of a likely playthrough.

I accepted most of the morally questionable stuff. It comes with the series, and you’ll either have to accept it or not play. It’s balanced out with obvious social satire; it’s aware that this is not how people should act in real life. It’s a game for mentally mature players who understand that none of these are good people. That mental maturity doesn’t necessarily come with age.

However, I drew the line at the paparazzi storyline. Just felt too sleezy. The FIB torture bit also came close to me, but in-game, even Trevor didn’t feel comfortable with that, and he’s a monster.

Only other part I skipped was that damn yoga bit. Glad the game let you skip it while still progressing, because I don’t know what it wanted me to do.

I’m a little surprised it got so many 10 out of 10 reviews at launch. I guess the draw distances are impressive for a game that worked on the Xbox 360, and it uses those draw distances for important artistic effects. It makes it feel like a real city. But there are bugs that prevent progression years after release (albeit with workarounds most of the time), and some of the mechanics are bolted on. It’s a 9/10 movie and a 7/10 game that averages to 8/10.

There’s psychological quizzes that are much shorter than that. There’s a four question quiz that, on the surface, is about parenting. They’re actually about authoritarianism, and the answers are highly correlated with support for Trump.

https://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

They literally do not think of quilting or crossstich and such as hobbies. They’re not “important” like woodworking or rebuilding engines.

This is why STEAM (STEM + arts) is important.

People forget the “Bernie Bros” so quickly.

It helps when there’s some obvious consistency to your beliefs. I’ve shat on Dems a lot since the last election, both here and on Bluesky, and mostly get upvotes and likes for it.

It’s worse than that. It’s right just often enough to make people think it’s right all the time.

They’re popular in Wisconsin and Wisconsin-adjecent states. If I didn’t know the details, I would prefer to go to a local chain over Home Depot or Lowes or whatever, but, yeah.

Nah, just a typo.

If they use original art, no, even if the characters are owned by a company.

It may be trademark infringement, however. Depends on how close you get. See Spirt Halloween costumes for examples.

Menards. They have a history of dumping waste illegally and then daring the DNR to sue them. One example:

https://archive.jsonline.com/business/114143619.html

Prices tend to come down on these things simply because the car industry widely adopts them. For example, accelerometers became cheap because they were needed for air bags. LIDAR might not come down as much as those have, but it won’t be tens of thousands of dollars.

LIDAR generally works better at relatively short distances (like less than a km). Several other car companies are going with LIDAR and do alright. Musk thinks cameras with image recognition would be sufficient without anything else. It goes without saying that Musk is very wrong.

I’ve heard that phrase a handful of times now and it’s already making my eye twitch. Though I don’t think it’s meant to be complimentary.

He probably paid some fishing tourist shop to get him to just the right place so he could hook it and pull it in. That pic cost him money, and it’s really important to him.

Some time ago, I heard a story of CS and Econ professors having lunch together. The Econ professor was excited that Excel was going to release a version that blew out the 64k row limit. The CS professor nearly choked on his lunch.

Dependence on Excel has definitely caused bad papers to be published in the Econ space, and has had real world consequences. There was a paper years ago that stated that once a country’s debt gets above 120% of GDP, its economy goes into a death spiral. It was passed around as established fact by the sorts of politicians who justify austerity. Problem was, nobody could reproduce the results. Then an Econ undergrad asked the original author for their Excel spreadsheet, and they found a coding error in the formulas. Once corrected, the conclusion disappeared.

The trick is to take the hard drive out of the EVA foam.