• 4 Posts
  • 248 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 19th, 2023

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  • Congratulations. SpaceX, Inc. is pleased to conditionally extend you an offer of employment (contingent on a successful political background examination, employment eligibility verification and genetic scan) to the position of FACILITIES MAINTENANCE SPECIALIST at ARMSTRONG’S LANDING SPACEX LUNAR BASE. As discussed, your starting daily wage will be 96 DOGE, and working hours will be MONDAY-SATURDAY 05:00-20:00 UTC. Please report to ARMSTRONG’S LANDING SPACEX LUNAR BASE at 04:00 UTC MONDAY 14TH JUL 2093 to begin work.

    As an employee of SpaceX, you are entitled to numerous benefits, such as discounted employee housing at ARMSTRONG’S LANDING SPACEX LUNAR BASE. As agreed, you will be provided a Class-8 dwelling at the location indicated at a rate of 1,700 DOGE per lunar day. Please inquire with your supervisor for move-in information. As a reminder, housing at SpaceX facilities is contingent on good performance and your continued employment.

    Your supervisor has provided the additional information:

    Meet at Spaceport 9 at the aerodrome at 04:00 UTC. Remember to set clock to UTC and prepare 7 days for jet lag before arriving. Employee space shuttle tickets from Kennedy Space Centre on Florida Atoll can be purchased from SpaceX site for 20,000 DOGE, company will deduct payment from future payroll. Ensure right thumb print is in good condition. Employee access card can be obtained from security desk in front of Spaceport 7. Welcome to SpaceX family, hail Elon.


  • Woe will be the day when humans can no longer determine whether a video is AI or not, even after careful analysis. I wouldn’t have caught this one either but if given the fact that it is suspected of AI, it isn’t hard to prove it. The timestamp in the top left corner is off. 22-13-43-21 is a nonsensical date and the time jumps from 23:15:07 to 23:15:98 then 23:15:59 then 23:15:54








  • Words become more acceptable over time. In centuries past calling someone a devil or saying that they should go to hell would have been deeply offensive. Today these insults are so mild that even schoolchildren say them to each other. Even twenty years ago the word “fuck” was viewed with nearly as much taboo as racial slurs. Now, it’s a very common word that people will throw around in a casual context.

    Even the word n****r (means “black person”) and its non-hard-R variant are starting to lose their offensiveness. In African-American Vernacular it has taken on a variety of inoffensive meanings. It is now only offensive in certain contexts while fifty years ago it was pretty much offensive in all contents.

    At the same time, new words emerge and get labelled profane. For example, the word t****y (means “transgender”) would not have meant anything twenty years ago, and now it’s one of the most offensive words in the English dictionary. Similar story with the word f****t (means “homosexual”).





  • Your maths is not right. Inflation, in absolute terms, is a larger benefit to people with higher interest rates.

    Let’s consider the scenario where inflation is 10% for simplicity, and two borrowers who each borrow $100, but Borrower A at 5% annual simple interest and Borrower B at 25% annual simple interest. Both borrowers borrow the money at the beginning of Year 0.

    Borrower A owes $105 in Year 1 dollars at the beginning of Year 1. This is equivalent to $95.45 in Year 0 dollars.

    Borrower B owes $125 in Year 1 dollars at the beginning of Year 1. This is equivalent to $113.64 in Year 0 dollars.

    Compared to a 0% inflation rate, Borrower A saved 9.55 Year 0 dollars and Borrower B saved 11.36 Year 0 dollars. Borrower B saved 1.81 more Year 0 dollars than Borrower B due to inflation (but paid 17.55 Year 0 dollars more overall because of interest).



  • I think you’re overthinking it slightly.

    • French flag represents the language called “French”
    • Spanish flag represents the language called “Spanish”
    • Russian flag represents the language called “Russian”
    • German flag represents the language called “German”
    • Portuguese flag represents the language called “Portuguese”
    • Japanese flag represents the language called “Japanese”
    • Korean flag represents the language called “Korean”
    • Chinese flag represents the language called “Chinese”
    • Italian flag represents the language called “Italian”
    • But somehow, the British flag doesn’t represent a language called “British”, but rather, one called “English”, despite there existing an English flag


  • Firstly this is surprisingly high-quality coverage. I’ve never heard of this website but I’m pretty impressed.

    Secondly, regarding the lawsuit in general, I think that patent and intellectual property law regarding game mechanics and software processes in general are badly in need of reform. There doesn’t seem to have been significant legislative action to address this in any major economy that I know of. The number of bullshit parents being filed, unclear and vague rules as to how copyright/patent law works with respect to software, AI, and game mechanics, is really leading to a lawsuit culture where the only way to find out what the bounds of the law are is to spend millions of dollars on lawyers to litigate it in court, when really, legislatures should be actively writing new and clearer rules to deal with these issues before people need to sue each other to find out.

    The Internet of 2025 is just way too different and complex to operate using the copyright rules of the 1990s.

    If I were in writing the rules, there’d be separate categories of intellectual property for software libraries, game mechanics, fictional characters, and so on, with clear definitions on what is and is not considered fair use of these sorts of intellectual property. It should not be possible to copyright the design of a widely-used software API or game mechanic. And any such protection on those things should be comparatively short in duration (not more than a decade) so that others can eventually re-implement the design, and probably do so better than the original inventor.