I think I read that the studio insisted on changes that annoyed Mike Judge. Pootie Tang met the same fate. They should have just let professional comedians release whatever but some studio executive didn’t get the jokes and was like, “This movie won’t appeal to suburban fathers over 45.” or whatever.

In my experience, it often comes out that all of the shitty parts of comedy movies are not the fault of the creators. But comedians aren’t given creative freedom like Scorsese or whomever and also are like, “Make whatever edits you want. I made a stupid movie with my friends. You got my check?”

I’d say in the U.S., no one will even notice in New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, maybe Chicago and NYC but a place like Dallas or Jacksonville would be less tolerant. A place in the northeast like Boston or DC would be culturally less permissive but you’d be safe. They’re tolerant but have a puritan history (Boston) or are culturally sort of conformist (DC), for lack of a better term. DC is very much not hostile but it’s small-c conservative in the sense that everyone wears suits to work and it’s not counter-culture.

I live in New Orleans and am cishet — so don’t take my word for it — but even my “boring” high school friends own multiple dresses because of Mardi Gras and Red Dress Run and events like that. No one cares about gender conformity here but drive more than a hour away and it can get unsafe quick.

I can’t speak for coastal California but I’ve been there a bunch and it seems similar. No one is even gonna notice in San Francisco. It’s just expensive as fuck.

Most urban centers — especially coastal ones — are pretty chill about it in 2025, I would say. But you should ask residents. New Orleans and San Francisco are, in my experience, not even going to notice. But most cities aren’t actively hostile. If you prefer suburban life, I’d look at college towns.

This is hardly the dumbest one originally but I worked construction in high school and college. One old dude had gotten “RESPECT” tattooed on his abs in his youth. By the time I met him, he had a beer belly and had had some injuries and surgeries. It was just a completely different font/message.

By contrast, the best tattoo I’ve seen is a friend who is a musician. She has musical notes tattooed behind her ears. You wouldn’t even know if she did her hair a certain way (for a job interview or something) but when she was ready to party, the musical notes were on display.

I also knew a guy who was an artist who had an amazing sleeve. He obviously cared about the artistic aspect; he literally flew to Japan multiple times to have it done because he cared that much about being a canvas for the specific artist he chose. That was the most impressive. I like the subtlety of the music notes but I’m not against going all out. It’s really the middle-ground — like a drunk tattoo that meant something at the time — where people regret it later.

It’s probably less about making the kernel smaller and more about security and reviewing code. The less code you have to maintain, the fewer vulnerabilities even if it’s old code.

I would doubt almost 20 year-old code is taking up a lot of space or presenting new vulnerabilities. And it’s obviously open source so if anyone needs it, they can always use an older kernel or maintain it. Sometimes, your oldest code is insane. I wish there was a budget for every company and government to pay retirees part time to go back over their oldest code that’s still in use. A lot of retired programmers would do it for fun and nostalgia. And to be horrified something they wrote 20 years ago hasn’t been updated or replaced.

Live your best life. We all have bills to pay but If it isn’t the right fit, send out resumes. You owe corporations nothing. And you probably won’t get promoted if you hate your coworkers. You’re better off trying to find a better fit than trying to thrive somewhere that doesn’t match.

That advice goes to wildlife too. I’m guessing they won’t read this but if you’re a raccoon eating out of restaurant dumpsters, find the best dumpster. They got plenty nowadays.

At one job, I changed the default settings in everyone’s calendar to 45 minute meetings instead of an hour and it increased productivity like ten fold. Designers and developers need to have longer meetings sometimes but they don’t need a marketing person or an executive there.

If you’re using IQ as a measure of intelligence, you probably already know.

Honestly, this is a nice feature of macOS (or at least iTerm 2; I don’t use the official terminal). I know CTRL-C is used to kill processes and we all have that muscle memory but I usually try to change that on my personal Linux installs because I’ve hit it by mistake before.

I used to use CTRL+INSERT for copy and SHIFT+INSERT for paste but there’s usually no insert key on laptops or even small keyboards. It’s probably time to just adapt.

Why are you borrowing like $3,000 a credit hour to use ChatGPT? Take some fucking humanities courses so you don’t grow up to be like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk challenging each other to an MMA match. This might be your last chance in life to be surrounded by experts and hot people having discussions.

Being able to use software everyone uses isn’t a marketable skill. Learn some shit. You’re an adult now.

When I was still hiring, I barely even read the education section except out of curiosity or to come up with interview questions. The only thing disqualifying would have been if the school was fake (like a Trump University MBA or whatever). It matters for “prestigious” white shoe law firms, major investment banks, grad school, etc. but not really anyone else.

Don’t half-ass your cover letter and interviews, though. For people without experience, especially, I, personally, was always trying to make sure we had a good match. I read every cover letter in part to make sure (a) people were literate, (b) knew what the job entailed, and © could be put in a position to succeed. You don’t want to hire someone who doesn’t match. A person applying to a non-profit working with schools and a person applying at a rocket launch start-up aren’t equally qualified regardless of skills and that’s fine.

I know needing a job sucks but there are always qualified people who just aren’t a good fit. So, don’t take it personally if you get rejected. I’ve been to third interviews because I got along with someone and then not chosen for jobs that, in retrospect, I really shouldn’t have been hired to do. I would have been miserable and left. Maybe it was a culture mismatch or maybe I’d didn’t care about the product but thought, “I could live in that city and get another job in a year.” There’s always “finalists” and sometimes, it comes down to a coin flip.

Pretty sure Palantir got the “Keep Americans Divided” contract and not the non-profit radio stations that do Tiny Desk concerts and have to do fundraisers all the time to keep the lights on.

I had better than 20x20 vision when they gave us eye-tests in high school and I’ve often gotten, “Holy shit, you can read that from here?” I always chose screen space over font-size even on small laptops but I recently had to dial it back a notch for the first time. The optometrists come for us all, eventually.

My vision still seems fine but it takes longer to adjust and focus. Like I have a digital clock I used to glance at to check the time and now I have to squint for a few seconds and wait. It’s sort of like a phone camera auto-focus where it sorts things out but it used to be immediate.

It’s actually pretty reliable. It’s left wing, to be sure, but during the BLM protests, for instance, they had actual reporters on the ground and were live-streaming everything. They’re transparent.

I don’t know where to place it on the “reliable” spectrum. From what I’ve seen, their articles are sourced and edited but live streaming from a chaotic situation is sort of like being a “war correspondent” where it can be impossible to know what’s happening. So, it’s probably important to get more context later as more comes to light. But I’ve never seen them lie deliberately or anything.

I don’t know the term for it but maybe “guerrilla journalism” or something like that. They’ll send a dude on a skateboard to the middle of a riot while other reporters are in the “press zone” and covering police press conferences or whatever.

Thank you for clarifying and adding detail. I’m basically just a tourist who had friends living/working/studying in China. But Sinophobia annoys me in a dozen ways.

It’s one of those situations where you have first-hand experience and other people have imaginary concepts based on propaganda. Assume everywhere is similar and be delighted when you find cultural differences or new food or whatever. Regular, sane people all want the same things, regardless of borders.

deleted by creator

I didn’t think they should use A.I. yet at all. I don’t think the shitty version of machine learning of today is ready for engineering giant explosive things. As someone else pointed out, document management for regulatory filings and stuff is (hopefully) the use case. I don’t care if it’s used in that way.

Basically, I think today’s “A.I.” should be treated as alpha software. It has a ton of potential but there is a lot left to do, especially on things involving human or even critter life like rocket science, self-driving cars, or military applications where “edge cases” are life or death situations. (I don’t think it should be used for military applications until it’s really fucking mature tech but it’s already apparently being used for that so the cat’s out the bag there.)

That makes sense. Like you, I’ve generally found that LLMs are incredibly useful for certain, highly specific things but people (CEOs especially) need to understand their limitations.

When it first came out, I purposely used ChatGPT on a trip to evaluate it. I was in a historic city on a business trip where I stayed an extra few days so I was traveling alone. It was good at being a tour guide. Obviously, I could have researched everything and read guidebooks but I was focused on my work stuff. Being able to ask follow-up questions and have a conversation was a real improvement over traditional search.

That’s obviously a limited use case where I was asking questions that could have been answered in traditional ways but I found that to be a good consumer use case. It knew details that wouldn’t necessarily be in a Wikipedia article or Guidebook that would take me 15 Google searches to answer. Just my own little curiosity questions about an old building or whatever. I cross-checked things later and it didn’t hallucinate. Obviously, a very limited use case but it was good at it.

What the fuck is SpaceX using a large language model for?

I’m middle aged and in OK shape but notice lots of differences. Like, I can still do long hikes but need a recovery day and if I get injured, I basically just don’t heal anymore. A shoulder injury just means I have a bad shoulder now and not “I will be back to normal in a week.”

Thanks for the correction. “Capitalistic” was a poor word choice. I meant it as “sort of capitalist” rather than “fully capitalist.” Market-based but with Chinese characteristics, I guess? Capitalistish?

Some friends lived/worked there when we were younger — in college, they focused on China and I focused on Europe/Econ — so I’d visit and talk to them about their housing situations but they weren’t speculators or anything. I didn’t know about the “homes are for living, not for investment” act. (You won’t believe this about a Lemmy user but I’m a software engineer and science/tech nerd. So, at this point, I mostly follow their space program and tech industry. All my other knowledge is based on personal experience or what friends told me and is definitely a bit outdated.)