AFKBRBChocolate
@AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Anon tries to understand credit scores 4 days ago:
Hmm, I don’t think so. I’m in my 60s and I’ve always paid my credit cards in full each month when they’re due. Until very recently, I did have a mortgage and paid the regular payment (with occasional extra payments for principle), do they did make money off of me there. My credit rating has pretty much always been at or near the highest it can be.
- Comment on Anon tries to understand credit scores 4 days ago:
That one actually makes sense to me. A utility bill isn’t credit, it’s a different debt, so paying it when you’re supposed to doesn’t demonstrate responsible use of credit. On the other hand, if you can’t pay off any sort of debt on time, you probably aren’t a good risk for loaning money to.
- Comment on Makes sense 5 days ago:
I started working at a company in the mid 80s, and stayed there for 40 years. They did Christmas parties until the f early 2000s or so. Honestly, I was kind of glad they stopped. There were always idiots getting drunk and doing/saying really stupid stuff.
- Comment on Increasing the surface area of a substance increases its reaction rate. Proof by garlic. 1 week ago:
I think I hate vampires less than mosquitos
- Comment on Increasing the surface area of a substance increases its reaction rate. Proof by garlic. 1 week ago:
Huh, interesting, hadn’t seen that.
- Comment on Increasing the surface area of a substance increases its reaction rate. Proof by garlic. 1 week ago:
No joke - my wife and I were eating so much of it for a while that you could smell it on our sweat.
Also, what they say is true: we got zero mosquito bites during that time.
- Comment on Increasing the surface area of a substance increases its reaction rate. Proof by garlic. 1 week ago:
Oh, it’s amazing. Get a head of garlic and rub off all the exterior papery stuff (but not the skin of the individual cloves. Some people also cut the pointy tips off. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast until soft. Get some nice bread, warm bread. Pull off a clove, hold it by the bottom and squeeze it like toothpaste onto a slice of bread. Enjoy the most wonderful garlic bread variant.
- Comment on Apparently your hobbies becomes less interesting if you're forced to do them all the time? Who knew? 1 week ago:
Yeah, this is 100 percent true. It doesn’t even have to be what you do for a living. I used to really enjoy cooking, but once I got a family and had to cook meals every day, whether I felt like it or not, it became a chore. As chores go, it was still better than most, but it stopped being something I looked forward to.
- Comment on Why does everyone put celery in soup stock? 2 weeks ago:
Because it’s a very popular, traditional ingredient in a lot of soups. You would have the same problem if you didn’t like onions or carrots.
- Comment on Why does everyone put celery in soup stock? 2 weeks ago:
I don’t care for crunch in soup, but a like the celery flavor. I’ve added celery seeds to things I don’t want actual celery in. I’ll make stock with celery, onions, and carrots, and then strain them out.
- Comment on Never buying milk from Walmart again 1 month ago:
You can buy it in half gallons and quarts, too, but a lot of families go through a gallon in a couple days.
- Comment on Banana 2 months ago:
The one that no longer exists where banana flavoured candy derives its flavor from.
That’s actually a myth. See Wikipedia.
The Gros Michel has a higher concentration of isoamyl acetate, the ester commonly used for “banana” food flavoring, than the Cavendish.[12] This higher concentration is responsible for the myth that banana flavoring was based on the Gros Michel, but artificial banana flavor was not based on any specific cultivar.
- Comment on those of you with good skills to defuse a tense situation at the workplace, what advice can you give me? 2 months ago:
Your friend was feeling attacked, and you walking away made her feel abandoned and unsupported. She just wants to know that you have her back. Yes, standing beside her to help show a united front would do that some.
Usually to defuse a situation like that, I would try to understand what Karen was actually upset about, and let her know she’s being heard (which is, ultimately, what she probably wants), but also let her know she’s taking it out on someone who doesn’t deserve it. Saying “calm down” is just going to piss her off. Saying “Hey, I understand you’re upset, and I would be too, but the staff here has no ability to schedule your father for surgery when there aren’t any doctors, and you’re yelling at the wrong person” might.
- Comment on What possible evolutionary advantage is offered by my ears suddenly sprouting tons of hair? 2 months ago:
I should have included those things an individual does to help their direct offspring - those also help you pass along your genes. Whether it’s nurturing your young, or dying and letting them feed off your corpse, anything you do to help them survive can be part of natural selection too. Don’t those things increases the likelihood of that trait being found in the population. Ear hair isn’t one of those things.
- Comment on What possible evolutionary advantage is offered by my ears suddenly sprouting tons of hair? 2 months ago:
I’d bet you’re right.
- Comment on What possible evolutionary advantage is offered by my ears suddenly sprouting tons of hair? 2 months ago:
I’m not a geneticist or anthropologist, but apparently that’s a debated, not proven mechanism. The theory being that natural selection works not just on individuals, but on societies. So if older members of a society are more inclined to help take care of the young, that society is more likely to survive, so that trait is more likely to get passed along and become more common in the population. That mechanism would only apply to social/pack animals (like humans), so wouldn’t apply to, say, turtles.
But it’s hard to argue that ear hair in old men helps their society thrive. More likely, it’s just one more trait that is a result of aging and not selected for, like grey hair or wrinkles.
- Comment on What possible evolutionary advantage is offered by my ears suddenly sprouting tons of hair? 2 months ago:
Natural selection works when you have a trait that makes you more successful at living long enough to pass along your genes or at attracting a mate to pass them along with. Your offspring are more likely to inherit that trait and so they’re more likely to pass along their genes as well, so the trait is more prevalent in the population. Conversely, if you have a trait that makes it harder for you to live, you’re less likely to pass along your genes, and so that trait is more likely to be less present in the population. If you have a trait that doesn’t impact your ability to live long enough to pass along your genes or attract a mate, it has no impact on natural selection.
So if you have a trait that only appears after you’re past the baby making stage, it’s not playing into natural selection. By definition, that trait didn’t help you survive or attract a mate or whatever before having kids and passing it along. It just happens, like lots of other traits.
- Comment on What possible evolutionary advantage is offered by my ears suddenly sprouting tons of hair? 2 months ago:
I remember in college, there was a human sexuality class that used what was essentially porn, but with really old people, to reduce the number of people who took the class to watch porn.
- Comment on What possible evolutionary advantage is offered by my ears suddenly sprouting tons of hair? 2 months ago:
Unlikely that anything happening when your old is selected for - you’ve already passed on your genes if you’re going to and nothing is helping you do it more.
- Comment on How do I make pictures less blinding if I prefer dark apps? 2 months ago:
Have you tried the bluelight filter most screens have?
- Comment on Ants Trapped For Years in a Soviet Nuclear Bunker Survived in The Most Horrifying Way 2 months ago:
You needn’t eat the leg, Thompson.
- Comment on Mark Zuckererg Demos New Facebook AI And It Couldn’t Have Gone Worse 3 months ago:
I honestly never look at the AI results because they’re so flawed so often. I don’t have an awful lot of problems finding answers to things with a standard search and then scrolling past any sources that are often crap. Worth noting, by the way, that search results, especially Google’s, were way more accurate several years ago, before there were so many sponsored results and they had agendas to push. So technologically, it’s a fixable situation, it’s just the enshitificaiton problem.
- Comment on Mark Zuckererg Demos New Facebook AI And It Couldn’t Have Gone Worse 3 months ago:
I’m an old fart - I got my degree in CS in 1985, and I’ve been paying attention to the predictions and advancements in AI for a very long time. I have at least as much issue with the way people think and talk about it as the author, but probably less of an issue with it being called AI. Remember that for decades, the informal working definition of AI was “A computer doing anything that usually requires a human.” So for ages, they said we’d have AI if a computer could read a page of printed text out loud in English. That seemed almost unattainable when it was first talked about, but now it’s so trivial that no one would consider it AI.
People have tried to make definitions that are crisper than that, but few if any of those definitions requires anything we’d call “thinking.” The frustrating thing is that the general public talks all the time about AI as if it’s conscious . Even when we’re talking about its flaws, we use words like “hallucinating,” which is something only thinking beings can do.
To me, LLMs are the worst things because to so many people they seem like the are (or could be) thinking entities. They respond to questions in a lifelike manner and can construct (extrapolate?) somewhat novel responses. But they’re also the least useful to us as a society. I’m much more interested in the Machine Learning applications for distilling gobs of data to develop new medicines or identify critical items in images that humans don’t have the mental bandwidth for. But LLMs get all the press.
- Comment on Anon doesn't like AI 3 months ago:
That works if your company makes yachts, but not so well if your company makes fast food burgers.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
I don’t think it’s weird, but your whole situation is pretty unusual, so I wouldn’t let “weird” become an obstacle for you. Some things are going to be weird no matter what you do, so just roll with it. You’ve said you and your brother have a good relationship, so why not just explain to him what’s going on with you and ask if he could include you at least sometimes? Not too much to lose by talking about it.
It sounds like a lot for you to deal with. I hope you’re doing better now and can find your way back to a life you feel satisfied with.
- Comment on Looking for a way to make a proportional timeline out of an Excel or CSV file 4 months ago:
I’m not where I can get to a computer, but as I recall you can do this with a line graph by opening the formatting option on the X axis and setting it to be a date.
- Comment on Don't we all? 5 months ago:
Apparently it stems from the days when women had servants who helped them dress, while men generally didn’t.
- Comment on Bringing Back Trelane | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 5 months ago:
My dad was friends with Bill Campbell, the guy who played the original. Pretty funny guy. He told me that he had this thick accent - I want to say it was Bronx - and his parents sent him to a voice coach to give him a more upper crust accent, but they just couldn’t completely get rid of it, so he ended up with that odd speech that became kind of trademark.
I ran into him at a local wallmart years ago and he had a bunch of action figures in a basket. Turns out they had just come out with the Trelane action figure, which he thought was great, and was buying some for kids in his family.
- Comment on Anon is Illiterate 5 months ago:
Yeah, it really throws me off. I’m a little overly sensitive to body language and other cues about what a person is thinking and feeling, and some of that is messed up when the speed is increased.
- Comment on These totally legitimate comments 5 months ago:
Awesome.
“This glowingly price review is almost perfect, it just needs something… I know, a scream emoji!”