This sounds like schizophrenia to me. Particularly the weirdness and occasional paranoia. There’s no agreement on the causes of it, as far as I know. Whether AI can either cause it or push someone over the edge, I have no clue.

My brother has schizophrenia and is one of the most technologically inept people I know - both before the symptoms and currently. It is known to have existed well before modern computers.

Also worth noting that schizophrenia onset usually occurs in adulthood with and average age between late teens and early 30s. Later onset is less common, but known to occur.

There are a lot of modern languages that don’t have a pure “yes”/“no”. Likely, this was not uncommon in history either.

Alternatives to “yes”/“no” in those languages can vary. They generally include methods such as “not (that)” or negating the (sometimes (mis-) implied/interpreted/understood) verb of the question.

A social security number/card is not exclusive to citizens. Green card/permanent residents, for example, usually get them - particularly, if planning to/already working.

Any kind of national/citizen id would need a whole new process and require it be provided to 100% of existing citizens. Time-consuming and certainly a cost associated with the process.

It’s one of those “in theory” easy things, but a lot more difficult in practice, I imagine.

I would like to see measles, polio, and bird flu (preferably, in that order) spread through members of the executive branch (and those appointed by such) and the oligarchy. I see no concern there.

Interesting fact I learned when replacing detectors is that small humans (i.e. toddlers) are more likely to wake up and respond to human voices/words.

There are detectors, for example, that say “Fire” (in English-speaking countries, of course). And kids are statistically more likely to wake up and respond to the smoke detector alert than the brain-piercing, ear-splitting buzzers that are more standard.

I put the above ones in bedrooms and the horrible, deafening ones in hallways and common areas. I also went the 10yr lithium battery route. Had to search online to order these, because they’re not generally available at retail stores.

I agree with the general sentiment. My thought is that a lot of these can be conceptually equated to “receive”. This includes situations like “fetch” where you you’re saying “Do something, so that I receive X!”

I think you can reformulate a lot of these to be from a different perspective, such that a different verb would work. “Receive” just seemed the one that struck me as the most likely.

Papers probably was the wrong one to bold.

Effects (i.e. personal effects) is likely better and the first definition I found is “Items of personal property that one carries on one’s person, including identification, jewelry, and clothing.”.

I’d argue a phone falls under this definition.

Difficult to tell if this was a joke or autocorrect. Being forced to play a game (sudoku) as a loss, sounds… odd.

Seppuku is the Japanese word for a type of honorable suicide by cutting your own stomach in a Z shape (or at least attempting to).

Yes, thanks for clarifying. I typed it out that way because “reserve” was in my head for the remaining sentences. As we both noted, there is a reserve, but it doesn’t back all the minted fiat.

There was a gold standard. Current fiat money in the US is based on an imaginary “base” that the Federal Reserve (itself, an institution notoriously based on an imaginary base). There is a reserve of gold, but it no longer matches the amount of minted coins/printed bills.

Edit: reserve->standard as noted in a reply

While the lucid dreaming comments may work, there is a lot of trial/error/luck to it, I think.

I had accidental lucid dreaming as a kid but have failed to do so as an adult. I have tried numerous times, even with considering suggestions from people online. Therefore, I will come at this from experiences I have had without intentional lucid dreaming. (Possible that I reached a point of accidental lucid dreaming during these, but hope it helps, nonetheless!)

Finding “perfect” hiding places after/during a chase.

Recognizing that waking up from a similar/the same situation very recently (eg the movie Inception) is basically impossible. Even if you have brain damage, the duration of a day and night are fairly difficult to ignore. Brain damage or medicine/drug use is more like losing chunks of time that feel lost vs waking up repeatededly and/or in short order.

I (at least once recently) had a scare that felt like sleep paralysis and/or attempted demonic possession. Basically, I was sleeping but “felt” awake but couldn’t move/make sound and felt like darkness was “hunting” me. It was scary af. I just kept trying to scream or yell “ahhh”. I think I tried it about 8+ times before I woke up finally. Each time I screamed, it got louder…slowly. I knew I was breaking free slowly, but it was extremely scary and I felt like if I didn’t escape, I would be trapped/taken forever.

Depending on the feeling of the dream, you can sometimes play in/with it. This touches on the accidental side of lucid dreaming, I think, but I have had variations of feeling afraid and then treating it as a game, such as hide’n’seek or even flipping it to start finding/hunting the thing that feels like the agressor. Not sure I recall enough details to explain specific examples, but hope this general explanation helps!

Edit: typo

I grew up elsewhere but lived in Canberra (the capital in ACT) for about 4 years. I heard about all the scary, deadly things and was a bit worried also. Long-story, short - it’s very unlikely to be an issue unless you live in certain areas.

The big funnel-web spiders are mainly an issue in an area north and a bit south of Sydney and reasonably close to the coast. I never saw one of them while living there (except in photos). My understanding also is that the spiders tend to live outside of the urban areas and more in the suburban/rural areas.

You’re more likely to get into a car accident with a kangaroo than have an issue with those big-ass spiders, from what I was told. They’re somewhat like deer in the US. But less of a joke because they are known to slash people with velociraptor-like foot naila/claws after being hit by cars and assumed to be dead by drivers who get out and check. Death by disoriented/injured kangaroo is scarier than death by spider in Australia for most, and I say this seriously!

The scariest spider stories I had… 1. out of town for several months and my bicycle had a black widow-looking (the redback, I believe) spider under the seat. and 2. one day, there was some sort of spiders born and sailing on the wind event where little spiders where everywhere (but they weren’t the Sydney funnel-web or redback spiders, luckily).

The last three sentences are not quite accurate. It’s not necessarily that nothing existed before the the big bang. It’s a singularity event where mathematically we can simply not know what existed at/beforehand that moment. It is somewhat comparable with the event horizon of a black hole.

There is something happening/existing, otherwise a black hole would not be able to occupy space or affect light. We simply do not have the ability currently to understand what that is.

By definition, that is not nothing. It is a that we cannot know/understand it, at that moment. Notably, a lack of evidence is not evidence of nothing.

Late reply, but apparently it was also known as “Verse, Chorus, Verse” which rings a bell from that time of life.

I also came across the No Alternative website. Put a lot of this album into perspective for me! Things I sorta knew where going on but make a lot more sense in hindsight and just being old enough to follow it.

Running Android 14 and somewhat disagree. I have had 1-2 games running in the background after “exiting”/“quitting” the game and dropped from 80-90% battery to 30% in less than 2 hours. (GPS and Bluetooth both disabled). Battery dropped as though I was actively playing with the screen on during that time.

Killing apps has helped me with this issue, in general. However, for the offending game, setting “app battery usage” (specific to Android, not sure of iOS equivalent, if any) has helped better for this issue. Seems a lot of games are trying to load unmecessary stuff and/or sell usage data, despite exiting the game…

Various websites suck in one browser or the other or simply don’t work in more than one single browser. We’re not that far away from the days when Internet Explorer (IE) was the only thing that loaded a site (often for something work-related… groan)

That said, if you need Chrom(e/ium) and want a non-data-sucking version, I think Ungoogled Chromium is your best bet currently.

For the Firefox side of things, there are already several forks that aim to do things differently/better. Floorp is one I see recommended regularly. There seem to be a larger number of Firefox forks focusing on security/privacy than Google forks, but this is the most well-regarded from my research.

Simultaneous post-enshittification from both Chrome/Chromium and Firefox is probably (hopefully) leading towards more active development/contribution to these (and other) forks!

On my 25th birthday, my roommate and I had the great idea to do Skittles vodka. If you’re not familiar, you basically separate each color of skittles and use filters (think coffee filters) to infuse the color/flavor into the alcohol you poor over.

It mostly tasted like vodka. And even though I had a brewery tour and bar outing under my belt, it still tasted like pretty much pure vodka.

What I remember of the night was pretty good overall. But waking up in Skittles-colored vomit… both hilarious (in hindsight) and gross.

Quality is enough for the 2-wire speaker cables. The coax cable makes sense from the photo, but I personally I wouldn’t have figured it out from the photo. Seems like a lot of ideas from the left-most cable but it seems too broad to be ethernet and especially telephone. It seems like power, based on width, but difficult to tell without a more direct view of the cross-section and preferably cutting some of the outer-most shelling to see the inner colors

EDIT: I disagree that the black and red colored frayed cables are power. Those colors are most frequently speaker colors AND frayed from being forced into speaker ports. You don’t normally get fraying like that from power-related components (e.g. power outlets).

Vaguely remember seeing this album around. Thanks for the hidden track reminder - any recollection of the song name?

There are cases other than what you mentioned where the carrier refuses to unlock. During 2021, AT&T forced a phase out of 3G and provided allowed customers to get a free upgrade phone in the process. As a prepay customer, I took the phone but jumped ship to a different carrier. I tried to get them to unlock the phone earlier this year and they refused. There was no contract/lease involved, but they didn’t like that I didn’t remain a customer with them for (I think it was) 180 days after that.