It boils my blood how many people who ought to know better keep promoting the idea of human exceptionalism, when all evidence is to the contrary. I cannot count how many times a broadly accepted idea that “only humans can do <x>” has been soundly disproven. And every time, it seems, one of two things happens:

1. People outright ignore the evidence and keep parroting the same bullshit.
2. They move on to some other arbitrary distinction that hasn’t yet been disproven scientifically, but is obviously also bullshit.

Tool use, language, culture, and object permanence spring to mind. Lots of good research on various types of abstract thinking as well, with a wide range of animals from pigs to crows to octopuses to bees and more.

We’ve demonstrated that these “human” traits are NOT exclusive to the human species. In many cases they’re not even exclusive to our genus, family, order, class, or phylum. (I half expect someone to tell me they’re not exclusive to the animal kingdom, even; please share any relevant research on fungi or plants if you have it!)

At least we, as a society, have moved on from the “featherless biped” era.

I agree with you that it’s just a convenient rationalisation, not a considered belief. I guess the idea of moving beyond human exceptionalism is a distant dream when we can’t even move beyond racism and nationalism.

I remember when some company started advertising “BURN-proof” CD-R drives and thinking that was a really dumb phrase, because literally nobody shortened “buffer underrun” to “BURN”, and because, you know, “burning” was the entire point of a CD-R drive.

It worked though. Buffer underruns weren’t a problem on the later generations of drives. I still never burned at max speed on those though. Felt like asking for trouble to burn a disc at 52x or whatever they maxed out at. At that point it was the difference between 1.5 minutes and 4 minutes or something like that. I was never in that big a rush.

It’s a real post on Reddit. I don’t know what combination of screenshotting/uploading tools leads to this kind of mangling, but I’ve seen it in screenshots from Android, too. The artifacts seem to run down in straight vertical lines, so maybe slight scaling with a nearest-neighbor algorithm (in 2025?!?) plus a couple levels of JPEG compression? It looks really weird.

I’m curious. If anyone knows, please enlighten me!

Neat!

If anyone else is curious, there’s a lengthy blog post with some photos here: https://www.aboomerslifeafter50.com/travel/is-the-amtrak-auto-train-worth-the-ride-heres-my-take-going-to-florida/

Two adult rail fares $286 + one roomette for two $565 + automobile $269 = Grand total $1120

And a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_Train

Honestly, I’m amazed how long it’s taken Microsoft to run GitHub into the ground. But let’s be real: enshittification is inevitable. This is Microsoft we’re talking about.

The best time to migrate away from GitHub was 2018. The second-best time is today.

If you have the bullseye mark, you’re not fine. You need penicillin or you risk borreliosis.

Yeah, I was pretty freaked out. But on that part, I assume they just knew better than I did. To me it looked a lot like tick bite pictures I found on the internet, but I’m certainly no expert. I saw my GP ASAP after that and he didn’t think it was from ticks either. Maybe it was some other kind of bug bite, or an allergic reaction to some other woodsy thing. No way to know, since it all went away on its own in the end.

I’d advocate for erring on the side of caution, but I totally understand why people instead err on the side of not getting fucked over by medical bills.

I’ll tell you why. Because it’s fucking expensive.

I had what looked like a classic “bullseye” tick bite (several, actually). People told me “run, don’t walk, to the ER”. So I did.

The ER doc told me it was probably fine but I should see my doctor. $600. They had the gall to bill me $600 for telling me to go see a doctor. And that’s with “good” insurance.

I still have no idea what caused those marks.

Looks cool!

But I gotta ask: what is the deal with your font making all the I’s and L’s bold? :(

I’m not sure that would make much difference. When you control the media companies (including social media), you control what people see and hear. When you control what people see and here, you control what they believe and how they act, to a large extent.

Which is not to say that it wouldn’t be an improvement, just that it wouldn’t solve that particular problem. At least not directly. Perhaps it would make it easier to implement systemic changes we’d need to truly address it.

Jeff Bezos didn’t buy the Washington Post out of a love for journalism, that’s for damned sure.

Figures. If these shysters at Colossal had any integrity, they wouldn’t be calling their modified gray wolves “dire wolves” in the first place. Everything Colossal says about their dire wolf project is misleading or just plain bullshit. They’re not “de-extincting” anything. They’re making a larger breed of gray wolf. But that doesn’t sound sexy enough to set them up for a cash-grab IPO.

It would be like taking your compiled machine code and editing it by hand because your compiler sucks.

Just use the right tool from the start.

Maybe so? I mean, I’m exaggerating a little, but those are the two primary ingredients of most of these non-salad “salads” that I would find in a typical diner or supermarket.

Potato salad, egg salad, macaroni salad, and tuna salad are fundamentally mayonnaise, potato/egg/macaroni/tuna, and spices. Probably some chopped onion and herbs as well. They are often nearly-homogenous glop.

I’m sure there are less offensive ways of making these things, and perhaps I would actually consider some of them “salads”. But yes, the glop I described is commonly called “____ salad”. I don’t think it would be reasonable to call them “salads” with no qualifier. These are compound phrases, and it’s best not to get stuck on the etymology.

You can also call a poorly-written headline “word salad”. And yet if I ordered a salad and got a copy of the New York Post, I would be very confused indeed.

The problem here is the assumption that modifiers can be safely ignored.

In the same way that veggie chicken is, obviously, not chicken, a bowl full of potatoes and mayonnaise is not a salad. It is a potato salad, and the word “potato” is doing too much heavy lifting to omit.

If I asked someone to get me a salad, and they came back with a potato salad, I’d assume they were pranking me.

This is why dictionaries list multiple definitions for words.