I’ve worked a lot of contract jobs and very few straight jobs. I would love to have a really good straight job at this point in my career, but the contract work wasn’t bad at all. It’s usually worse benefits. And make sure it’s W-2 and not 1099, or you’d better ask for a lot more money, because you’ll pay double the taxes you’re used to. I learned a lot because it’s usually a very diverse environment in terms of people’s experiences, so there are lots of different perspectives from the jaded pro to the recent grad.

I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I’m slowing down and getting tired of constantly being in team building mode. I want a straight job where I can build up specific expertise and relationships and use my experience on a single set of products/services. But I don’t regret my contracts. I mean I could tell horror stories about a couple of really shitty contractors I worked for, but the actual job and people I worked with were great even so.

Yeah. Had this conversation with my wife and she’s with you - emphatically.

So far, the publicity appears to be providing an unexpected boost to Baidu’s stock price. The company’s shares achieved their largest daily gain in over a year on Wednesday, and are still up for the week as of Friday afternoon.

That’s because the government showed they will cover for the company when they hit someone. If the US government suddenly stopped investigating Boeing and blamed quality issues on passengers “gossiping”, their stock would go through the roof, too.

I don’t care that they did this. I just can’t see why anyone would pay attention.

None of this makes any sense to me. I’m not defending any part of it, but I also don’t really understand the bits about objectifying women (the AI is literally an object and it can’t be anything else) or pushing impossible beauty standards on women - these are drawings. Why would a girl feel pressured to look as good as an image that doesn’t have actual bones or organs or skin pores - not even fucking gravity.

But that confusion aside, this is just the stupidest thing ever. There is no artistry. There is no, you know, working to stay in shape or applying makeup just so. It’s all a bunch of fake stupidity and I can’t understand why anyone would care at all about this, much less deign to critique it from a feminist perspective. It doesn’t seem worthy of spending the time analyzing it to that degree.

Of course I’ve just wasted two paragraphs of my life on it so I guess I shouldn’t cast stones.

It could halt the progress of improving their models and stagnate the whole technology.

That being said, it only halts progress for American companies. Other countries will happily ignore this law and grow beyond our capabilities. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than the current situation.

We’re worth less now because they’ve already taken a bunch of our money.

Hackers in this case likely means someone who can read a url and increment a number and is curious. Which ought to be everyone over the age of about 7.

Congratulations! Everyone is now a hacker!

Honestly the same as I reacted when I found out about gay and trans people - mostly not give a fuck because it has nothing to do with me. Though obviously I’d be drawn into the rights issues as people try to hunt them with fucking crossbows and shit.

We do eventually grow up at least

… into horny men

… but hopefully with a little more empathy and propriety.

Are you arguing that this woman shouldn’t be able to tell her story - without naming names - because someone else might get angry and do the wrong thing, and then a bunch of other people might do the wrong thing with the wrong information?

People are supposed to get angry about shit like this - it’s how change happens. And people have to know about things to get angry.

The problem here isn’t the woman telling her story, it’s that mob harassment is a tool being used politically and this behavior you are worried about has become normalized. Twenty years ago, this would’ve led to a bunch of people contacting law enforcement and politicians to demand justice, but now everyone harasses people directly because our system isn’t responsive and because mob justice is treated as legitimate as long as it’s enacted upon the right people.

Hah! Fair enough.

Religion is deliberately non-falsifiable. No matter what scientific proof you can come up with, at the end of the day they just say God is fucking with us burying skeletons of creatures that never existed and such.

The fact that it needs to be constructed that way is frankly all the proof I need to toss religion in the garbage, but everyone isn’t so cavalier about the disposition of their “immortal soul.”

Honestly immortality and the very nature of God are both abhorrent to me. If religion were true, the best I could hope for is to be cast into a lake of fire and be destroyed, so I kinda win either way. Worst case is all religion is wrong but so is atheism and I have to spend eternity with an entity who is less of a malicious cunt than the Abrahamic god.

They don’t actually care about the show. They are flying their flag. So the answer is if straight white cis men don’t outnumber everyone else put together it’s woke.

Mostly only drink tea while I’m sick. I drink coffee every day getting up with my wife, but I’d rarely drink it on my own.

A few weeks ago my wife went out of town for a long weekend and I had the most persistent headache that wouldn’t go away. When she came back, it went away as soon as I started drinking coffee with her and I realized it was caffeine withdrawal. I hate being physically dependent on coffee, but it’s a big part of our morning ritual.

I love America. I’m rather less fond of some of the people in it. The land is beautiful and varied. There is so much space here. And the constitution is really special, I think, though not perfect. The biggest flaw is people haven’t been taking politics seriously and have elected unserious people.

I swore to defend it many years ago. At the time I was a kid just paying lip service to a required oath, swearing to a god I never believed in, but the truth is I do love it and I would fight for it, warts and all.

My ring used to do that shit. I stopped using it for like a year. Then I was bitching about it and someone said they just got one and it worked great. So I tried it again out of spite to show what a piece of shit it was and now it works within a couple of seconds. shrug

I fucked up a lot of potential relationships by being too horny, and a lot of potentially fun hookups by being too serious. But it all worked out in the end.

Admitting you’re a pedo isn’t a good look. Fortunately you don’t matter one bit to me. All your anger, rage, jokes, whatever - none of it is worth anything.

He just needs a good cry and he’ll feel better.