I’m pleased to report that all those other promised utopia frameworks turned out perfect, and aren’t in any way still a huge daily pain in the ass. I expect no less from this time around. Computers are finally smart. It’s great.

It’s the AI that is prone to delusions, or was that just me?

A little more time and a lot more money. But the savings will be huge. The savings will make the current era of extravagant burning piles of money look like a sound investment. You’ll be glad you got in on the ground floor…

We do need a little more time, though. And money.

This one really shows Larson’s willingness to put the work in to convey a silly joke with only the art details.

I text my friends. I assume that everyone else just thinks I died.

The move between seeing “your brother in law took the kids to the zoo” to “your brother in law liked this trash article” was such a jarring transition.

It was awful.

“Oh, look. He’s a little bit racist. Now I get to know that. Thanks Facebook.”

“Hospitality/ Nevada”

I see we’re still playing along with that euphemism. Haha.

Yes. I’m not sure what else has gone on, but NAFTA and the US China Relations Act sweaping all of the manufacturing out of the country could account for the whole change between the two maps.

If they came with wall mounts, you might think like I did “I’m not sure I want to wall mount these.”

But now I can say - it’s great. It feels good to have them wall mounted in a prominent visible place.

This does look very 90s. I hope it 90s so hard.

Thank you for sharing this. Patman was a delight. He made some of the best “History of” videos for classic games.

RIP Patman QC. He will be missed.

But when a mid-tier or entry level dev can do 60% of what a senior can do, it’ll be a great way to cut costs.

Same as how an entry level architect can build a building 60% as tall, and that’ll last 60% as long, right?

Edit: And an entry level aerospace engineer with AI assistance will build a plane that’s 60% as good at not crashing.

I’m not looking forward to the world I believe is coming…

Sure, like NFTs were here to stay, and the gazillion different shitcoins that were popping up everywhere some years ago.

I bet you’re just angry that you didn’t hold onto your ape NFTs. They’re going to skyrocket back soon. (I hope my sarcasm here is obvious, of course.)

The little squiggles are necessary to ensure election outcomes acceptable to the ultra rich.

I’m joking. (Mostly)

The squiggles are probably county line divisions, and probably simply the smallest existing land divisions with good population data available to make the map from.

I say “mostly joking” because existing county line divisions are already weird in some cases, to ensure election outcomes acceptable to the ultra rich. So there’s an unpleasant grain of truth in my joke.

the very fact that there is a big urban/rural cultural divide is one of the things killing America.

I agree wholeheartedly about the problem. But blind highest count vote on every topic is one of the big dividers between rural and urban folks.

Rural folks will simply never have the numbers to influence outcomes in a pure vote count scenario. They’re aware of this, and it leads to animosity.

Incidentally, I agree that financial decoupling would be ruinous for both, as well.

The real solution is represtational seats that give everyone a voice - no matter how the voting zone is divided.

I suspect that requires doing away with first-past-the-poll. The winner of that race will almost always be a city person, by raw numeric chance. That’s fine, city folks have some good ideas. The problem is when there’s no rural voice at the negotiation, at all.

And I think any sensible person realizes we also have to put a stop to all gerrymandering.

Also, we need to give seats to what remains of all of the first nations, while we’re at it.

It might be possible Ferengi also have higher-than-human-average neuroplasticity and simply adapt easier - this might even aid in the on the job theory.

I think you’re on to something.

Various Ferengi having a kind of genius foreign to Federation values is a recurring theme in DS9.

Nog, in particular, gets up to some antics that probably require some brilliance. I recall him hacking or circumventing things even early in the series.

This still has the representative issue that each of the narrow bands are narrow due to a huge metropolis within them, and the rural population of that band will always live with rules created by the metropolis for the metropolis.

It’s a pretty map, though.

And is still makes more sense than “carefully negotiated by powerful ultra rich a few hundred years ago to protect each of their giant egos.”

It’s worth noting that we also lose on the output, contractors tend to underperform compared to long term stable employees.

So there’s a case to be made that it is even lose/lose/lose (more expensive/worse outcomes/loss of economic stimulus of good stable jobs).

What I assume went down at the studio:

“People have expressed exhaustion toward movies centered on Chris Pratt. Is there anything we can do about that, while still making another movie centered on Chris Pratt?”

“Well, sir…no one is asking for another Garfield movie…”

“Perfect. It’s match! Get someone to sell us the rights to a first pass AI script, and ship this thing.”

The answer is 2.

Cling to known humans who write their own code.

Snake oil salesmen always encourage the public to bet against the experts, with predictable results.

Someday ethically sourced AI can be used responsibly by trustworthy coders.

But the key is choosing to collaborate with trustworthy coders.

There’s a bag of parts I don’t know what to do with.

Any leftover unused parts are worth extra points.

At least, that’s what I tell my spouse.

Maybe I got it done with fewer parts because I found a novel improved solution…

Sometimes my spouse figures out what the extra parts are for… And doesn’t seem to mind that using the parts correctly lowers the score I dreamed up…