From the show I saw, the early choice was between foxes that would immediately try to kill you versus foxes that would be willing to let you live. The floppy ears and curly tails happened very gradually in the process.

The “not selected” foxes were snarling and snapping and generally being nasty as hell.

The coolest thing about that experiment is that just selecting for tame and docile foxes also caused them to develop floppy ears and curled tails.

I recently purchased an incredibly shitty hand truck for a move.

Apart from the not unexpected need to beat a part into shape with a hammer, it also included a “wrench”. Really just a vaguely wrench-like shape stamped out of a piece of 1/8" thick sheet metal.

There were three different sizes of nuts and bolts required for assembly, and the “wrench” didn’t fit any of them.

If we scream into the void, how will we hear it when it calls?

Not arguing you’re wrong, but I’ve been witness to the other side of that sort of conversation.

The item was ketchup. Always needed to have ketchup. Then:

Child: “I hate ketchup!”

Mom: "What do you mean? You put ketchup on everything.’

Child: “I’ve never used ketchup. I’ve always hated it.”

[Jump forward a few years]

Child: “Where’s my ketchup?”

Mom: “I thought you hated ketchup?”

Child: “Since when? I use ketchup all the time.”

As the dad, I’m tempted to point out that mom doesn’t need help losing her mind, but as the dad, I also know better than to be involved.

We have guinea pigs, so the definition of “good box” has changed to something that is just the right size and shape to be made into a hidey.

As soon as we put in the new box, the girls start destroying it, so we need a constant supply.

Also: someone took the picture.

TIL I have the same treadmill desk as Linus.

Edit: and he also appears to ignore the safety clip.

Try to separate the AI hype from AI.

AI has been around for years and we all utilize the results of that research.

Remember that at one time a compiler was seen as AI.

It’s the curse of AI: once a problem is solved, it’s no longer AI. It just becomes a tool, and we adjust what “intelligence” means to exclude the new abilities of computers and code.

Even LLMs have value, just not how they’re being used. If you carefully curate the training materials, you could have a useful tool.

I’d love to see an LLM trained exclusively on medical records of patients who were successfully diagnosed and treated. I wouldn’t want to give it a medical license, but it could be a useful tool in the hands of a competent physician. It might turn out to be useless, but we need to try it.

I do that.

It’s the team I previously managed. We all still work there (so far), but I’m no longer a manager. The team was disbursed for various reasons.

We didn’t want to say goodbye, so we set up a discord so we could keep shit-talking. We still get together every few months for dinner.

Google 50501!

“Come on, officer, I couldn’t do that even if I was sober!”

Looks like a portrait of Trump watching a black church burning.

That’s the whole joke.

It’s not very funny.

How stupid do you have to be to damage the contents of a box when opening it with a knife? Was he just jamming it in anywhere?

Just urinate on the butt before you put it in your pocket. It’s still less nasty than throwing it on the ground.

I’m not a smoker. I never have been. I’ve always been amazed that smokers somehow managed to get society to look the other way at such blatant littering.

Will prices start going down now?

If the claim of invention instills a sense of pride that prevents assholes from tearing it down, then keep pushing that story.

I’m in the US, and every time some right wing jackass mentions Canada’s healthcare, they pull a story out of their ass about someone who died waiting for care. Conveniently ignoring the large number of people in the US who die without even considering the possibility of healthcare because they can’t afford it. Left unsaid: “You don’t understand! The person I know who died was white!”

The media should certainly respond to Trump’s bullshit, but the response should be to ignore it and keep asking what his plans are to reduce prices, end inflation, and all the other impossible, contradictory promises he made to get the morons in this country to vote for him.

When I still managed a team, at the beginning of every team meeting, we’d have the Two Minute of Hate. Everyone in the team would be able to complain about whatever was bothering them.

Very often, when the hate was work related, the team would come together to solve the problem. It worked really, really well.

Other managers tended to be very uptight about the idea.

Sometimes the hate would last through most of the meeting.

After some fairly distressing and debilitating hates, I added Eye Bleach permanently to the end of the agenda. It was when people would share something to make everyone feel better. It was usually either cute pet or kid pictures, or happy news or uplifting stories.

I still work there, but I’m not a manager anymore. I’m still strangely part of the management team, but I have no direct reports, and I’m not officially a manager.

I’m not really sure I was really the person they wanted managing people. I suppose it’s not too surprising, but the entire management team seems to think they are what keeps the place working. I always saw management as a necessary evil. My team was what kept things working, not their manager.