Melllvar

https://www.kingdomofloathing.com/

A free text-based RPG browser game with a unique sense of absurdist humor.

The one thing that bothers me about the metric system is how much of it is never actually used. No one says “1 megameter”, for example. They say “1,000 kilometers”. When you think about it, most metric prefixes are never used with most metric units.

Joey, have you ever been to a Turkish recruitment office?

“Expressed greater intent to commit rape”

I would really like to know how they measured this. I get the feeling that the men being studied didn’t come out and state, “yes, I have a greater intent to rape” on a survey or something. The researchers must have been using something as a proxy for “intent to rape”.

I’d also like to see the stats for how many of the men have actually raped someone. For example, if 86% are rated as “more likely to rape” after watching porn, but 99.9% don’t rape anyone, then that would suggest there is no correlation between porn and rape.

Merde

Each decade of age took me half as long as the previous one did.

0-10 took forever

10-20 took 20 years

20-30 took 10 years

30-40 took 5 years

And I fear it only gets worse.

Let us, like Him, hold up one shoe and let the other be upon our foot, for this is His sign, that all who follow Him shall do likewise.

Tom Hanks in “Big”?

https://youtu.be/RsDj2fzEGdM?t=65

Here’s a rainbow that is close enough for the trees across the street to appear behind it.

Reminds me of the old trick on HTML forms where you use CSS to make one of the form fields invisible to humans and reject any submission that filled in that field.

first initial middle initial and last name

I do this when it’s a work-related document. Anything personal I write out my first name fully. So good luck forging my signature on possibly the wrong kind of document, people who want to forge my signature but only have one example to work from!

Don’t give up a stronger position for a weaker one in hopes of avoiding a conflict. You’ve only undermined yourself when the conflict happens anyway.

I’m an apartment building superintendent. I once confronted a late night trespasser: a junkie looking for a place to shoot up or snort or whatever his thing was. I demanded that he leave, but realized that I was physically blocking the only exit. He was cornered. So I moved out of the way and suddenly I was the one who was cornered. It all worked out in the end, but for a minute there I was facing a large, angry, paranoid junkie with a knife and no way to escape.

I don’t know what would have happened if I didn’t move to give him an exit, but I know that in doing so I gave up my own exit, and that was dumb.

I’ve had customers like this. Usually they just write their name in block letters. There’s no rule that says a signature has to be written in cursive so it still works.

My Yahoo email address is 27 years old.

Realistically, that would get annoying pretty fast and I’d soon learn to hate any song I chose. So I’d pick 4′33″, which is four minutes and 33 seconds of silence.

But otherwise I’d pick “One Bad Tank”, from the video game Left4Dead2. It’s the song that plays when the boss enemy enters a particular map.

My mom’s early 90’s minivan. I think it was a Voyager.

“Privacy” in the modern sense is less about protecting you from personal embarrassment or financial loss, and more about protecting society from the dangers of mass data collection.

Historical examples of mass datasets that were misused:

• The Nazis used demographic records (birth, death, marriage records, etc.) to identify Jews and other undesirables in conquered countries.
• Japanese Americans were identified for internment in part through illegal use of census information.
• The Rwanda genocide was facilitated by tribal information being printed on drivers licenses.

In none of these examples were the data collected for the evil purposes it was eventually used for. In some cases, the evil purposes were completely forbidden by the rules governing the data, but they were used anyway.

Information is a form of knowledge. Knowledge is power. And power in the wrong hands is dangerous.

When in doubt, shut up.

The problem is that an AI built to maximize paperclips might conclude that converting the planet to paperclips is an acceptable cost of maximizing paperclip production. It might understand why humans think it’s bad to convert the planet, but disagree. It would need to be explicitly programmed to prioritize human life over paperclips.

otherwise we would just switch it off

If it were super-intelligent, it could probably trick us into leaving it turned on.

A paperclip maximizer driven by self-preservation? What could possiblie go wrong?