In the theater watching Rocky Horror, toast flying, newspaper on heads, people up at the front acting it out. good times…

While peppers are prolific cross-pollinators, you don’t see the results of that in the original fruit. If you grow a habanero and a jalapeno next to each other, the fruit they produce will be exactly what you would expect from an ordinary jalapeno and an ordinary habanero. If you save the seeds, however, and grow the F1 hybrid it will be a mix of the two parents phenotypes. It won’t look exactly like either parent, and will be some combination of the two in flavor.

If the original fruit you got from the jalapeno was different than you expected it could have been a hybrid itself, or it could have been growing conditions encouraged a spicier flavor.

Pro:

• It’s good at explaining things. You have a question about coding, geography, or most anything you could answer with a thorough internet search and enough time to sift through the results, it’ll give you an answer immediately that’s tailored specifically to your question.

Con:

• Answers are sometimes subtly wrong in a way that’s hard to pick out unless you already know the answer or are already an expert. It’s like having a really smart uncle who likes to prank you every few times he talks to you.

Pro:

• It can generate any text you ask for. A love letter to your girlfriend, an application for a job, an article to post on the internet. Instead of spending hours thinking about something, learning something, and sharing your opinion on it, it can just give you polished text that makes it look like you have a smart take and an opinion.

Con:

• People who use it for this are getting dumber. It’s growing near impossible to teach kids in school because they can just Chat GPT a paper on the Great Gatsby in seconds. All they end up learning is how to ask an LLM to give them an opinion. This is also producing a tidal wave of slop in every outlet that used to depend on human creativity. Open source coding, books, news, online articles, and many other arenas used to take effort to generate something, and there are systems, businesses, and processes built on the assumption that a human is generating content. Since that’s no longer true these systems are breaking down.

Another Con:

• It’s fucking up the economy, the job market, consuming absurd amounts of energy, and sucking up the production of computer components.

Pro:

• It allows anybody to generate art in almost any style with very little effort. You can produce the picture you want in the style you like in moments.

Con:

• The reason it can do this is the AI companies stole and used art generated by real people in the training data for their LLMs. So now if you want a cartoon in the style of your favorite artist you don’t even have to ask them to make something for you. You just ask an LLM. Obviously, this is killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Business for artists dwindles and they struggle more and more to live. The end state of that is all art is generated by LLMs and nothing new is ever created.

I could go on, but in short the drawbacks greatly outweigh the advantages. Yes, you can get quick answers to questions, but the net outcome on people and society is massive damage.

Looks like the truck skidded sideways into the beam support, knocked it over, and then the beam fell on the truck.

My uncle took his own life when he was 19. He didn’t leave a note. He didn’t warn anyone. Just one morning my grandmother walked in and saw him hunched over on his bed completely pale, all the blood drained out of his face. There was a glass of cyanide in water on his bedside table.

It broke them. Neither of my grandparents recovered. Years later I was staying with them for a while and I overheard my grandmother say “we have our son back”.

Every suicide is like that. It’s like a bomb that shatters the lives of everyone close to you. It isn’t a solution. It doesn’t end the pain. It just passes it on to everyone else. But nobody would do it if the pain were bearable. “Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping.” There is no blame, no judgment, only tragedy and pain.

But people who survive and find help Will tell you that it gets better. That they’re glad they survived and that recovery is possible So if you are thinking of suicide, know that it is the worst possible option, no matter how hopeless it seems. There’s always another way.

So is it just the DMT or is the psychotherapy part important? How important? What type of psychotherapy are they using, CBT, IPT, MPCT?

I always just use a cold stick of butter like a crayon. Grab the hot toast and wipe the butter on it straight from the stick. Butter knives are only for room temperature butter.

I’m my experience it’s about a ten to one ratio of people who shit on vegans because they “never shut up about it” vs vegans who actually never shut up about it. So a vegan wanted to show she could climb Mt Everest. She did it, then she died of acute altitude sickness during the descent, something completely unrelated to her diet. Her husband, also vegan, lived. She became one of hundreds of people who have died in that climb, all of whom wanted to prove they could do it. Just let people live their life how they want to. Heaping scorn on someone who died trying to prove themselves isn’t cool.

These kinds of takes have legs because the capitalist parasite class really does value profit a lot more than your life or mine. When a drug company finds a cure for blindness and decides to charge almost a million dollars for it, you can’t really argue that they have your best interest in mind, or even a shred of human decency. That said, the take posted is not how it really works. If they discovered a drug that cured asthma in 3 days they’d patent it and sell it for a million dollars. They’ve already done it for other ailments. No one can argue they wouldn’t.

(and btw, just disable JS to kill the paywall on that link)

Well, your showerthought post was basically rich people cause suffering and climate change. It’s true they generate a hugely disproportionate amount of CO2. But my point (and maybe it wasn’t clear) was that when there is an easy energy resource just sitting underground, it’s going to get used whether by rich people or not. It provides too much of an advantage. Having coal and oil at your disposal is like having a near endless supply of free workers. One liter of gasoline, when used in an engine, produces roughly 2 to 4 kWh of mechanical energy, equivalent to the daily labor of about 100 people. No society is going to turn down that many guiltless slave workers. We were told 100 years ago it was going to cause climate change, but we didn’t have the technology to replace it with electric at the time. Effective batteries are a recent invention. So there really was no alternative. Your neighbor country is making use of millions of ‘energy slaves’ and growing their population like crazy. Are you going to continue plowing your fields with donkeys and hoping you can feed your people? No, using that energy was inevitable.

And now? Theoretically we could replace our energy infrastructure with renewables. In the US it would take at least 5 trillion dollars and who knows how long and how much energy to do it. But I don’t think it’ll stop climate change. Call me a doomer, but I think it’s already too late for that. We’ve already released enough CO2 to kill the planet. The effects just take about ten years or more to show.

Sure, we want to blame climate change on the fossil fuel industry, the capitalist owners thereof, the big industries, long haul ocean shipping, etc. But I don’t think it’s realistic. Imagine the situation a few hundred years ago. We burned wood to keep warm in the winter. We cut down forests and pre-burned them in vast quantities to make charcoal which we then used in smelters to make iron and steel, in kilns to make pottery and glass, in steam engines to turn all sorts of things. We were on track to cut down every tree on the planet to use for one of those things. Then we found fossil fuels. They were better than wood in every way, except that the generated CO2 wasn’t renewable. Any nation that used them surged ahead of all others in productivity, defense, offense, and quality of life. To refuse to use them, even if you knew they would kill us all a few hundred years later, meant that you got outcompeted, and probably overrun or conquered. There was no option. So everyone used them more and more. That’s been the story ever since. It’s a Faustian bargain. You get comfort and success now and someday your ancestors will suffer. But you figure that they will be smart enough then to solve the problem so you don’t worry about it. Yes, our economic system guarantees that a small number of people will profit from it the most. And they will make it worse one way or another. But climate getting worse just a matter of time. Even if we had the most enlightened people making decisions for us who would agree when they said we all had to stop using fossil fuels? There is almost nothing you use in your life that isn’t made with fossil fuels somehow. And it’s too late now. We can’t go back. We can’t all be subsistence farmers. There are too many of us. We can’t survive without fossil fuels.

tl;dr - yeah, the capital owners are awful, but climate change would have happened without them.

My first guess was a three way portmanteau: fucking + tangled + angular. Not sure how angular fits. Maybe sharp pointed or something?

I’m 57 and I started running this year. Overtraining is the biggest issue for me. I’m up to about three miles maybe four times per week, but most of those miles are zone 2 HR, really slow and easy runs. On the weekend I’ll do a tempo run, or intervals, alternately. If I maintain that schedule for more than a month or so I end up a little more sore every time I go running and my time starts to drop. So I have to take most of the week off every four or six weeks. I also take a lot of supplements; creatine, L-carnitine, Beta-Alanine, protein, etc. They help. I feel I can exert myself more since I started taking them. I also take EFAs for joint health, collagen for connective tissue recovery, and sometimes MSM, though evidence on that one is spotty.

They are, but then you’re pooping out of your vagina, and that’s something that one would notice.