The hamster also wants to be the one to press the red button.

But why male models?

Show a scene where one gets drunk and kills a guy by colliding with his boat and then gets his wife to take the fall for him.

Or a scene where disaster strikes and one of the tech bros comes to “save the day” with the most naive idea, like something that sounds good until you think about it at all and realize it’s missing some important fundamental parts of the picture. And then they try to absolutely ruin whoever shoots the idea down and actually saves the day, followed by getting more and more unhinged as they see the reactions to each reaction.

Could have one just die because he thought fruit was the cure for anything that could to wrong with him, which ironically might have even caused the issue that killed him in addition to doing nothing at all to help him. Have other characters obsessively talk about how much of a visionary he is. Could make the death scene happen while he’s giving the most smug and patronising presentation about some new piece of tech that has a thing or two that sound nice but is presented as if they expect the user to be confused about the most basic shit, followed by a giant price tag. Then add on something that is normally included in the price, but this time it’s sold separately for a price that suggests it’s a revolutionary new version, but it’s incredibly basic.

That is, don’t try to top this shit. List it, maybe play it up a bit, then you can end it with the text “this was all based on real events and real people”.

It was an observation I’ve made from reading/seeing other examples. Not surprising that others have noticed it.

Is that a parody fan fic that points out Rowling doing that with any character with more intellect than a rock or dehydrated slug?

Yeah, some responses think you don’t understand scientific notation. At least it’s kinda funny, they misunderstood what you were saying so much they thought you misunderstood what the comic was saying when you were actually pointing out that the comic appears to be underestimating the size of the problem space it’s pretending to pretend to enumerate (aka it can be very difficult to write for a character that is intended to be smarter than the author, even when the author is really smart like this one is).

Yeah, it’s like she wanted to avoid the Tolkien fantasy cliches but somehow ended up making it even more cliche and lame.

Looks like the current votes in this thread don’t really appreciate just how fast total permutations of large sets grow. It’s one of the few things that can dwarf that number for the total number of atoms in the observable universe.

But we’re talking permutations of sound combinations that can be of arbitrary length. Going by that alternating consonant/vowel pattern above (which simplifies it because you can have consecutive consonant or vowel sounds in words and phrases), the numbers of pairs would be 120,000. That’s less more than 100,000, so for each pair in a phrase, you add at least 5 0s to the total possibilities. 2000 / 5 is 400. Unless I screwed something up, that means the maximum length of a query is 400 consonant/vowel pairs before you have to introduce gaps (which goes against the random noises that got responses). Halve that because it can start with either a consonant or vowel sound.

A rough estimate of the number of sounds in the above paragraph is something like 225, and I simplified my count by ignoring consecutive consonant sounds (which it is full of).

Like yeah, 10 to the 2000 is a huge number but when you’re dealing with permutations, you use up numbers very fast. A more popular counter example is the stat about the total number of permutations for a deck of cards, where they say if you shuffle it well, you probably have a unique sequence of cards that has never been seen before. Iirc, that number is within a the ballpark of the order of magnitude of that total atoms in observable universe estimation. And that’s just with 52 possibilities and no repetition (calculated by factorial, whereas sound combination possibilities grows even faster and isn’t limited to 52 options).

Edit: corrected that bit where I rounded the 120,000 to 100,000 to simplify the math by looking for a minimal value rather than the actual value.

Yeah, that’s where I’m at, too. Though I’m caught between intending to drive my current car (2013) into the ground or trying to get something a bit newer (like 2018 or even newer) where I can find a pre-enshitification model to push off the “car dies and I have no choice” date.

To put it in perspective, that’s just over 100 years out of 4.5 billion the earth has existed. Or 300 million years or so complex life existed (that mostly wouldn’t be able to fathom the core concepts you’d need to know to even understand what having an air fryer means, where I’d consider “figured out that forest fires can contain more delicious food in some places (where intensity is high enough to cook plants and animals but not enough to turn them to charcoal)” to be pretty smart). Or several million that hominids have existed and using stone or better tools. Or several thousand since we figured out how to manage our food production rather than depend on always finding it. Or several hundred since we got much better at harnessing energy.

Also, I’d push back on a) the invention date being more relevant than the mass release date, and b) early convection ovens counting as “air fryers”, so that 100 years should probably also be reduced.

Yeah, true. I mean, there’s probably some that do, some that are in denial themselves, some that think they are on the winning side, and some that think anything negative will hinder the process. The formal parts of the process itself could have been coopted by the ruling class such that therapists are trained to perpetuate the system like cops and teachers are.

I’m going to push back but only slightly, as I agree that society itself and this hierarchy we’re stuck in is the root of a lot of mental health problems, maybe even the biggest sole contributer.

But where I’ll push back is that improving your mental health is different from improving your material situation. Both are important. The latter is about survival and between the two, arguably the far more important one. But the former is about how you react to the latter.

If you’re having panic attacks each time you think about your material situation, that’s going to make it much harder to deal with that situation. If you have trouble motivating yourself to get out of bed, that probably also affects your ability to do anything about your situation. If you lose your temper to the point where you destroy objects or relationships around you, that doesn’t help either.

Or on the perception side, if you’re constantly paranoid about everyone around you to the point where you don’t let anyone get close, it can help to recalibrate your expectations or where you draw your line for not trusting others.

Or if you recognize a pattern of using or manipulating people and want to break it or figure out why you keep returning to it.

I think in regards to how society is, therapy can teach you acceptance. I don’t mean “accept that this is the way it is and that it is fine”, you don’t have to do that second part. But the first part is true: the world is the way it is and unhealthy reactions won’t punish the world or change it, nor will allowing your nervous system to go into overdrive.

Whether you want to change it or just find a place in it, you need to first accept it for what it is, for better or worse. Then when you have that foundation of understanding and healthy coping skills, you have a much better chance of accomplishing, well, anything. Note that that is relative, I’m not going to try to push BS platitudes like “you can do anything!” It’s just “if you have a healthy mind or healthy ways of dealing with an unhealthy mind, you’ll have a better chance at doing anything compared to if you don’t”.

Anyways, therapy is one potential path to that. I see therapists as guides for a journey of introspection and getting to know yourself better as well as understand how you interact with the world and find new ways of doing so. Ultimately you are the one that needs to walk that path and the destination is still this reality, just with a healthier way of seeing and interacting with it.

Fixing this shit will involve a lot more than therapy, but it will require healthy minds.

Though I also don’t think the “gee thanks I’m cured” mindset is a healthy one. While I agree that it’s easier said than done, mental health is heavily influenced by your mindset and deciding “this won’t help” can be the reason why it doesn’t. Part of getting better, an essential part of it, is deciding that’s what you want and fighting the part of you that wants to just keep going like you have been because you’re comfortable with your habits, both good and bad.

And it either still commonly used today, used in a few rare places, or not used at all anymore.

Personally you had me at “top 5 tourist destination”. That just sounds like a miserable experience.

Seance results for someone trying to make contact with someone from gen z: nothing; they let it go to voicemail. You need to use an ouiji board because they are text only.

Maybe, but they’ll patch that as soon as they notice people doing it, forcing you to slightly modify the method because they aren’t very good at their jobs, plus every now and then an update will just revert your changes for no apparent reason.

Yeah, the AI based “AI detectors” are themselves slop.

Hollow Knight (both orig and SS) and Gravity Circuit, though Gravity Circuit did end up working the 2nd time while both HK games failed to launch without error message. I see each of those games on gog.

On the one hand, I agree. But on the other hand, that leash has led to pretty bad places many times over the centuries. I’ve come to believe that there’s some truth to the “humans are kinda shit” premise of Christianity, just that sometimes it redirects that shittiness and other times it directs it (or individuals do in its name, since Christianity itself isn’t an entity).

I have no idea if humanity would be better off with or without religion. I don’t need it personally but others having it might make everyone’s lives better simply because they don’t think they can get away with some things so don’t try them.

Oh real Sherlock Holmes here deducted that Pizzacake is annoyed by some people. Did you manage to uncover her hidden stash of comics and decode the secret meanings she subtly inserted into every single one of them?