It's okay, I'm 99% sure Musk's species sheds its skin on a regular schedule to begin with, that being the lizardpeople way.
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I'm not saying it's completely 100% not possible and has never happened in the history of human technology, but the situation is not as ubiquitous as most people seem to think it is.
Don't get me wrong, collecting and inferring personal information is happening on an epic and ubiquitous scale these days, but for the most part, it's not the microphones on your devices that are doing the data collection.
Pretty much all my older relatives are completely convinced their phones are listening to their day to day conversations and serving up ads based on those conversations. One of them came to visit me for a week over the summer. One night we had been talking about having asparagus for dinner, and as evidence that their phone was listening to us, the next day they showed me that their news feed was filled with asparagus recipes. Another night, we were talking about one of their medical conditions and the drugs they were taking, and the next day they showed me that they got notifications about a prescription drug for that condition. On another day, we had been talking about a specific actor's filmography and all their movies that we liked, the next day their streaming video app was suggesting a bunch of content from that actor.
I can understand why this seemed pretty convincing that our phones were listening to us, but consider the simpler explanation.
I live in a rural area where there's not good cellular reception, so for the most part, our phones are connected via wifi to the same internet connection. Essentially, every device on the property has the same external IP address. So, when I looked up asparagus recipes on my laptop later that night because I wanted to surprise my relative with that specific dish, and when I Googled the prescription medication the relative was taking to see what the side effects where, and when I looked up that actor on IMBD to see what all movies they'd been in, that pretty much gave all the advertisers all the information they needed to start targeting ads and recommendations to folks sharing the same IP address.
Occam's Razor being what it is, I assume that's how things went down versus all our conversations being constantly recorded and uploaded to the net to be interpreted and used for the purposes of serving ads.
I get it! "Hot Dogs"
I used to live across the street from a park that I jokingly named "The Island of Misfit Squirrels".
Most of the trail was through wooded areas, so lots of trees and therefore lots of grey squirrels. However, I'd never seen such a dense and high concentration of mutant, diseased, or disabled squirrels. There were squirrels without tails, squirrels with hairless tails, 3 legged squirrels, squirrels missing eyes, albino squirrels, squirrels with curly hair, squirrels with bald heads, squirrels with weird tumors growing out of their backs, squirrels with ... well you get the picture. And these were not rare sightings. Pretty much any trip to the park was a guarantee you'd see a misfit squirrel of some sort.
One of the squirrels with a missing eye had become very brave (or very stupid) and wasn't as afraid of humans as it should be. If you weren't on it's good side where it could see you, you could easily get close enough to pet it before it would scamper off. I watched some people throw down some kind of food for it, but they came in from the wrong side and it did not see what they'd left. Another squirrel scampered over and was scarfing down the food before the one-eyed squirrel noticed. Seemed like the moment it realized there was food and it started moving, a hawk just came out of nowhere and snatched it up. Some lady coming the opposite way down the trail also saw this happening and let out a screech like she was being branded by a hot iron, it was so loud and so sudden that it spooked the hawk and it dropped the squirrel. After it landed, it hopped back up almost immediately and ran off to climb a tree up in the woods.
To hear it from the conservative side of my family ... "Is there no limit on how many people he can commute?" and "There's no way he's able to sign all those letters, he can barely keep his eyes open."
I don't know how accurate it is, but they were saying he has already freed 1,500 people. I asked how many of those people were convicted of non-violent drug related charges, and they did not know nor did they seem to care. I thought that was interesting given some of my relatives', shall we call it, histories.
The major lift.
I mean, is it a wool sock? I feel like that's relevant.
Not so much a tear as it is a rip. And not so much fabric as it is dry wall. But the point remains.
Does the Steam Deck count as Linux Gaming? I assume it does, but honestly in the year 2024 and on niche forums I never know.
If it does count, then I bet my gaming percent is nearly as high. I prefer the larger screen on my laptop and some games that I play don't run (or don't run as well) on the Deck, but otherwise everything else about the Steam Deck makes it the superior experience.
I know that "brain damage made me conservative" is sort of a meme, but this has happened to several friends and family of mine over the years. It's happened enough that I seriously think there's something to it.
I doubt it will be too wet, but it will likely get too cold to reliably grow most vanilla species outdoors all year long. I think most conservative estimates say it'll grow in zone 11 and up, so if your specific doesn't match that criteria, you'll probably need to grow it in a pot and grow it some place warm in the winter.
It can be grown from seed, but it's a complicated process that will require some research and technical skills for a good chance at success. Then it will be about a decade or more before the seedlings are large enough to start blooming. Most people do not grow from seeds for this reason. It's much easier to grow from cuttings.
If I were going to use a dye on my skin for something like this, I would first test it out on a small patch of skin some place where nobody's ever going to see it, like on my penis.
Well, some people say men are basically just dogs and I guess if some of us can lick our own assholes, that's further proof.
I use VS Code and GitHub Co-pilot and develop in a variety of different languages and frameworks. I've got lots of experience with some, but I'm less knowledgeable on others.
So, having the AI assist with languages I am very familiar with is basically a way to save time and preserve my mental energy. For languages and frameworks I'm less experienced with, it speeds things up because I'm not having to constantly search how-tos and forums for guidance. And for languages/frameworks I have limited or no experience with, it can be a helpful learning tool that speeds up how long it takes to get ramped up.
With this set-up, if I start writing a line of code and then pause for a moment, co-pilot kicks in and tries to autocomplete that line, sometimes even suggests the entire block of code. It's really good at recognizing simple patterns and common boilerplate stuff. It's less good at figuring out more complex stuff, though.
However, I find that if I start out by writing a comment that explains what I'm trying to accomplish, and to some degree how to accomplish it before I start writing one of those more complex blocks/lines, the AI has a much higher success rate in returning helpful, functioning code. So, basically yes, I write the comment to describe code I haven't written, and I'll let the AI take over from there.
This works for code, raw database queries, configuration files, and even for writing tests. I'm not an expert at building out Docker configurations for local development or configuring auto-deployment on whatever random system is being used for a project, but I can often get those things up and running just by describing in comments what I need and what I'm trying to accomplish.
The VS Code co-pilot extension also has some context menu items that let you ask questions and/or ask for suggestions, which comes in handy for some things, but for me, typing out my intentions in comments and then letting the auto-complete kick in as I'm starting a line of code is faster, more efficient, and seems to work better.
Granted, co-pilot also likes to try to auto-complete comments, so that's sometimes funny just to read what it "thinks" I'm trying to do. And most of the time, I do remove my comments that were specifically to guide co-pilot on what I wanted it to do if they're super redundant. And, at the end of the day, not everything co-pilot suggests is production-worthy, functional, nor does what I actually described. In fact, a lot of it is not, so you should expect to go back and fine tune things at a minimum. It's just that overall, it's good enough that even with all the supervision and revisions I have to make, it's still a net positive, for now.
What you don't know is that he died when he was pulled into a jet engine.
Remember That DNA You Gave 23andMe?
No. When did I do that?
I know some folks are joking about and dunking on this, but in modern times, I have justification. Call me lazy, but I have found myself writing out these comments and then letting the AI take over to at least give me a sketch of an implementation. Works reasonably well and saves me a lot of time and effort. Mostly I don't bother to remove them, though I usually edit them a bit.
On the other hand, there are factions within my colleagues who steadfastly insist that commenting is unnecessary and to some degree even potentially harmful, and that if you feel the need to comment your code, it means your code should be improved so that it's obvious what it is doing without the need for comments.
On the internet, everything is a repost. We simply choose to have faith that an OP once walked this Earth, drizzling his seeds of thought all across the digital landscape. Praise be OP.
There was a movie about Lucy and Desi that came out sometime in the late 1900s.
It was being advertised heavily on one of the over the air television stations that we would watch on our cathode ray tube television that picked up signals from a type of antenna called rabbit ears. Back in those days, they'd sometimes have voice over commercials where they'd talk over the end credits of a show or movie, and apparently sometimes they did that live (I guess)?
Family and I are watching a show and when it ended, they did the voice over thing talking about the Lucy movie. The announcer started out strong but totally fumbled a line, something along the lines of "join Ducy, Lesi, and little Licky". I just know we all heard it, we all busted out laughing.
I think it's possible, but it needs to strike lightning to be at the right place and the right time in a proverbial sense, for it to be successful longer term. Everybody's trying to meet a metric in this world where clicks and views and conversions are easy to measure but something like quality is difficult to define at its best and impossibly subjective at its worst.