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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • When it’s actual news, I’ll hear about it regardless.

    I’m not going to perseverate over every headline, I have a life to live. The media is actively trying to piss us off, they’ll skew and distort and all but fabricate to keep us angry and engaged.

    I’m not doing it. I can’t recall a single time in my life that keeping up to date up to the hour has actually improved anything for me. Sitting around just knowing stuff is happening isn’t going to change my life for the better.

    I live in a safe republican state and a leans Republican district. I could send a letter to my senator, call my representative, spend hours of my time just worried about something, and still, they’ll vote how the party wants them to. Being informed and doing the things I’m supposed to do won’t change anything.







  • Imagine a slowmo video of a grenade going off. You’re walking in to that.

    Unless you go at 4 pm when they open, you’re in for a bad time. Actually scratch that, you’re in for a worse time.

    You go early for dinner, expecting to be sat immediately to be greeted by a press of people at the door. No one is happy, everyone is grumpy and in each other’s space. You wade through the throng to a hostess stand, which is next to a butcher’s counter full of disappointing looking meat. On top of it is clawingly sweet smelling bread. The 16 year old girl asks you how many impatiently, and takes your phone number. They’ll text you when your table is ready. As you’re trying to ask how long someone else pushes past you to grab a bowl of bread, and ushers a family of 4 morbidly obese people through an opening barely wide enough for the teenager.

    Oversized tables are mushed together and you watch them navigate a labyrinth before someone else pushes past you to talk to the hostess. You go stand awkwardly in a corner somewhere.

    It’s uncomfortable and crowded but it won’t be long, you tell yourself.

    The minutes drag on, you feel your will to stay drain with each passing second. As you’re getting ready to get up to leave your phone buzzes, your table is ready. You push past the throng of people, past someone asking how long it will be at the host stand, to see someone grabbing a bowl of bread for you. You follow the 32 year old teenager through the labyrinth to an oversized table. You actually have to sit on the edge of the booth to reach it, it feels too tall. The bench is over worn, and the guy serving you leaves without a word and returns with waters before asking what you’d like to drink, as if you’re interrupting him.

    You’ve looked at the drink menu, and they’ve taken the effort to rename every overly sweet cocktail to something cheeky, and you have to go by the pictures to know what they are. You decide to stick with water. He hands you menus and disappears.

    The menu is overlarge, sticky, and colorful. Nothing looks unique or interesting. It’s bog standard steakhouse flare and you remember the steaks in the cooler really not looking all that appetizing. You’ve had a basket of sweet dinner rolls and are no longer hungry but feel like if you don’t get an appetizer you’re missing out on the essential TR experience. You order the platter and a cheeseburger.

    The food shows up before you finish your water, and it’s fine. Nothing is wrong with any of it. You have absolutely no complaints about the food itself, but nothing stands out as particularly unique, or interesting. And you could have gotten all of this somewhere else cheaper, you’re sure. Maybe even less of it because the amount of food put in front of you is insulting. It’s a lot. The burger is difficult to finish and you have another basket of rolls you haven’t touched. 3/4s of what you ordered is still in front of you, you’re full, tired, and not really interested in having any of it later.

    You pay at the little computer that’s sitting on the table that you largely ignored after discovering it wanted to charge you 5 dollars to play an android game. You leave past an even denser crowd of people and vow never to go back





  • Wogi@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhy I am not impressed by A.I.
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    5 months ago

    We also didn’t make the model T suggest replacing the engine when the oil light comes on. Cars, as it happens, aren’t that great at self diagnosis, despite that technology being far simpler and further along than generative models are. I don’t trust the model to tell me what temperature to bake a cake at, I’m sure at hell not going to trust it with medical information. Googling symptoms was risky at best before. It’s a horror show now.







  • I worked in health insurance when that happened.

    The insurance companies were ecstatic about Obamacare. A big ole fat blank check from the American public, backed by the US government. They had to cover more but the feeling was, and it ended up being true, that they’d claw back their exclusions in court.

    Obamacare was a health insurance scheme in a healthcare costume. Maybe at inception it was about healthcare, but after the Democrats spent months trying to negotiate with Republicans and giving them pointless compromise after compromise, and the Republicans still refused to support it, they passed health insurance reform, mandated everyone buy it, and paved the way for the fastest increases in health insurance costs in history.




  • The rock is quite useful as an industrial tool. It’s when you cut it in to a fancy shape and wear it that it’s pretty useless.

    We use diamonds to test the hardness of materials, grind really hard things smaller, orient and locate specialized cutting tools, and cut through really hard things. Hell we sell garnet by the barrel to help cut through regular materials. Orderly carbon or, in many cases orderly aluminum oxide, is something we need a lot of. The price going down on those is actually good for manufacturing.