I’ve seen a lot of variations of the trolley problem, and this is the first time I’ve ever heard the “heavy man.” It also makes zero sense, because a heavy man would do nothing to a trolley.

Not if you want any kind of consistency so you can actually replicate or understand what you’re doing. Like hallucinations aside (and we really shouldn’t put them aside because they’re a very real thing in this context), the point of a recipe is that you aren’t just getting an averaged version of the process; you’re getting a curated version with specific considerations in mind.

So you can ask AI for a cinnamon apple pie recipe, and you might get an okay one, but you’re probably never going to get a better-than-average one. And if you do like the version of the recipe it gave you, you had better write it down because when you ask for it next time, it’s not going to be the same cinnamon apple pie recipe. I’ve personally played around with recipes in AI, and even within the same chat, there’s no consistency because it never “knows” anything; it only makes predictive guesses. So when I say, “I like that recipe, but let’s try half as much ginger and maybe add some mirin,” it will reduce the ginger and add mirin, but suddenly all the volumes of the other ingredients have changed, and some items may even disappear.

So yeah, I think this is something that AI could potentially work well for in the future, as is kind of always the case with any potentially useful AI application right now. But right now, until they’ve been developed with some kind of better active memory and/or something resembling comprehension rather than predictive association, I think this is a field where AI is passable at best, not yet somewhere it shines.

SEO is part of it, but it’s also literally just more physical real estate for ads. Recipe sites, including personal recipe blogs, are infamous for the sheer volume of ads placed on them. Yes, everyone just scrolls to the recipe so it kind of doesn’t matter, but longer text means more space for ads.

I miss Mike Rugnetta’s PBS Idea Channel so much, and it absolutely would have belonged on this list, imo.

Either existence is a empty nothingness devoid of meaning, or existence is a empty blank canvas upon which we can imbue our own meaning.

As does scissors before paper, since paper is just one of the many things you can cut with scissors

I bought a projector in the current millennium, so my projector actually doesn’t have a VGA port, just HDMI.

Man, I fucking love LJS and wish I had one within driving distance.

Nothing like ordering a fish & chicken plank combo and not knowing which of the identical diamond-shaped planks is which before biting.

Well anything after 3.5e is a watered-down, bastardized version of the game anyway.

That’s the meaning you imbue life with; it’s not inherent to its state.

My sister in DC spent so much money on a Charlotte Hornets Starter Jacket.

It was her prized possession.

I am confident she has never watched a Hornets game in her life.

bait

It wasn’t the only memorable thing for me, but it was memorable. Honestly I still think Starfield is a great basic framework for a video game, I just wish they put an actual finished video game onto that framework

If you think that bad dog owner entitlement is an exclusively Californian issue then I regret to inform you that I have terrible news about the rest of the country.

“Haute cuisine is dead! When was the last time you walked into a restaurant and saw aspic on the menu? When was the last time you heard of somebody serving aspic? Once aspics weren’t weird, they were the hottest fashion!”

^ That’s you.

Trying to define the relevancy and lifeline of music as a whole based on the popularity of pub folk music is crazy.

More people are making music today than ever before, as barriers monetary, technological, and knowledge-based only continue to lower with time. I have no idea how you’ve managed to draw the opposite conclusion.

New music is thriving. There is more music of almost every style and genre imaginable being released today than ever before. What’s dead is traditional music distribution channels and marketing avenues like radio, and the popular means of promoting music now reward the most dogshit meme-able content. But if you seek out music yourself, the modern era is a paradise of incredible music; don’t blame music itself for the failures of the industry to reward good within it.

That’s fair. This may be it then; as somebody who sort of “speed ran” childhood due to my circumstances it might just be hard for me to understand and relate to the normal developmental cycle and the impact of such things during it. Thanks for the perspective, cheers.

I’m sure this had profound impact, but frankly we all lived through it so I find it hard to accept as the sole or majority-dominant reason alone, personally.

I don’t disagree, but unfortunately nobody granted me authority on the general consensus on this one. I will say though that lineagial generations feel like only one possible definition, and cultural generations defined by common cultural experience (as is the case we’re discussing) feel like they have some validity for me as well.

Usenet, irc, forums etc were like an early training ground hardening us against the purveyors of bullshit. When bullshit became the business of billionaire corporations online we were ready for it. They never had a chance…

I think there is a lot to this. One of the big divides I’ve noticed is that these younger zoomers seems to conflate what is socially acceptable with what is advertiser-friendly, and I have to assume a lot of that comes from growing up in these heavily corporate-controlled spaces in comparison to the “wild west” of the internet that raised us.