I used it to extract thousands of rows from tables in PDFs and generate enumerations for them in various programming languages. I had to do some pre-processing with the Python script, and review all the output to make sure it didn’t screw up, but it saved me a lot of time.

I heard this.

Nope

Well, I was born here and it seemed like the thing to do.

Upvote to bring you back to zero, because why not. I thought your other comment was a reasonable question, even if I don’t agree, and nothing I’ve seen from you so far seems ban-worthy (although obviously, the mods might disagree with me).

To respond to your question - I wouldn’t promote my kid doing anything, really. I might put them in touch with experts, give them an education, or introduce them to useful people, but I can’t imagine any profession that my child could get into where I would go out of my way to “promote” their work.

If they were of legal age and decided to get into porn or sex work, I’d advise being careful (especially for in-person work) and I obviously wouldn’t be consuming any of their content, but other than that, I’d let them make their own decisions. I don’t let my kid play sports that are going to permanently impact their mental function, and I wouldn’t advise professional wrestling or football as a career choice, but if they decided that that was what they wanted to do with their life, that’s up to them.

I don’t see how porn is worse.

Participation trophy

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Actually, now that I think about it, Trump’s usefulness to Russia will end if it becomes clear that he’s leaving in 2028. Which means something like this could happen, if there were some advantage to be gained by it. That would be hilarious.

Had a conversation with my kid the other day about a book I was reading and ended up discussing genetic modification and why people are concerned about it. We talked about the Chinese scientist who modified babies to resist HIV, issues with eugenics, racism, economic disparity, the whole bit. We were out getting some pizza, and I think the couple in the booth behind us was listening in lol.

We have odd conversations all the time though, to be fair.

The thread of fate is more like a frizzy ball of lint at this point.

I took a screenshot and came here to post this lol. I wish more coverage of Trump was in this this style.

Reporter: asks a question about Epstein.

Trump: [18.32min, 5.7k words redacted: not relevant] “…I barely knew Epstein. Now Obama…” [6.87min, 1.1k words redacted: not relevant]

Reporter: …you say you barely knew him?

Made a trebuchet that almost destroyed a neighbor’s car. Tried to build a fuel-air bomb out of kerosene and a shotgun shell. Made napalm out of gasoline and styrofoam. Huntes squirrels with a .22 rifle.

Weird childhood.

Night birds

I’ll tell you the strategy that worked for me last time (quit for ~2 years), and that I’m using this time.

• Switch to a vape. Lung capacity increases immediately, and you get rid of the bad smell. If you haven’t vaped, give yourself some time to get used to the different habit (no cigarette packing ritual anymore etc)
• Buy a 0 nicotine vape or two, or find a local place you can get them easily. This is your “inside” vape.
• Buy a refillable vape and get nicotine liquid roughly equivalent to the full-nic vape you switched to from cigarettes. This is your “outside” vape.
• Start restricting the locations you use the full-nic vape. I work from home, so I don’t vape full-nic at my desk, I walk outside to do it. You want to break the absent-minded vaping+work or vaping+tv habit.
• Step your nicotine intake down over as long a period as you like, but don’t ever step it back up. First time I quit, I did it over about a year. That’s a little extreme. You could probably do it over a few months.
• Once you’re on 0 nic all the time, either stay with that, or gradually wean yourself off the habit as well. This is much easier without the chemical addiction.

Good luck.

I attended a federal contracting conference a few months ago, and they had one of these things (or a variant) walking around the lobby.

From talking to the guy who was babysitting it, they can operate autonomously in units or be controlled in a general way (think higher level unit deployment and firing policies rather than individual remote control) given a satellite connection. In a panel at the same conference, they were discussing AI safety, and I asked:

Given that AI seems to be developing from less complex tasks like chess (which is still complicated, obviously, but a constrained problem) to more complex and ill-defined tasks like image generation, it seems that it’s inevitable that we will develop AI capable of providing strategic or tactical plans, if we haven’t already. If two otherwise-equally-matched military units are fighting, it seems reasonable to believe that the one using an AI to make decisions within seconds would win over the one with human leadership, simply because they would react more quickly to changing battlefield conditions. This would place an enormous incentive on the US military to adopt AI assisted strategic control, which would likely lead to units of autonomous weapons which are also controlled by an autonomous system. Do any of you have any concerns about this, and if so, do you have any ideas about how we can mitigate the problem.

(Paraphrasing, obviously, but this is close)

The panel members looked at each other, looked at me, smiled, shrugged, and didn’t say anything. The moderator asked them explicitly if they would like to respond, and they all declined.

I think we’re at the point where an AI could be used to create strategies, and I would be very surprised if no one were trying to do this. We already have autonomous weapons, and it’s only a matter of time before someone starts putting them together. Yeah, they will generally act reasonably, because they’ll be trained on human tactics in a variety of scenarios, but that will be cold comfort to dead civilians who happened to get in the way of a hallucinating strategic model.

EDIT: I know I’m not actually addressing anything you said, but you seem to have thought about this a bit, and I was curious about what you thought of this scenario.

I was home schooled from childhood through highschool. I got a GED before I joined the military, then used the GI bill to go to university and took placement tests for everything, which put me at the same level as everyone else except for trigonometry, which I had to take a remedial class in.

Yeah, the US grade system up to highschool. I haven’t done those grades at all.

Never have I ever gone to school in grades K-12.

It’s also 60", which is absurdly large to me lol. Glad I could help, though.