>>468131 In Belgium, and presumably other progressive futuristic socialist paradises, you can't even buy bottles that don't have those shitty tops any more. The reason they force them on people is that people weren't recycling their bottle tops with the bottles, and were instead throwing the tops out with the regular rubbish. Now, forgive my impertinence, but has anyone here ever seen anything saying that you're meant to recycle the tops too? I do it now, but nobody has ever told me I should, so I felt aggrieved when I went over and was immediately punished for not following this rule I'd never been told.
>>468140 Generation X had the best TV and I won't let anyone say otherwise. They gave us The Simpsons, and all those other BRILLIANT '90s cartoons like Duckman and Dr Katz Professional Therapist. We millennials have achieved nothing on that level, plus we made The Simpsons worse. All our great advancements in white guilt, Marvel films and landfill indie cannot excuse what we did there.
And not everybody liked Kurt Cobain, or Nirvana, or Grunge music.
The early 90s were a carefree time like you can't even imagine nowadays. There'd be something to be said for being young again, but not in the present. I would honestly hate to be part of Generation Z and having to go through all the shit they have to deal with every day. Nothing about it is appealing. And a lot of it is of their own making. It's not all our fault for sending them on that trajectory. And most of it, you can blame on the Boomers.
>Generation X had the best TV and I won't let anyone say otherwise.
Granted, we had MTV. Back when it was actually a relevant source of music and everything you wanted to know about it, and hadn't yet descended into the abject daftness of the early 2000s with Pimp My Ride and other shows. I still remember the day Michael Jackson's music video to Black or White was first shown on MTV. It was nothing short of a global event.
But we also had tripe like Friends. So there's that, too.
Last shift before Christmas and obviously it had to be the biggest fucking nightmare out of the entire time I've been doing this job. Not even just because of the Christmas rush, but various factors including the weather and Radio 4's shitty schedule conspiring against me to make sure I had a miserable time.
Why shouldn't I eat this entire chocolate gateau to myself, other than the fact i only bought one?
>>468126 Are those the arty black circle ones that look like they'd be worn by a drama/english teacher who leaves mid-way through the school year for unknown reasons? Someone at work has had them for a few years and now another one got the exact same style even though it involved changing the shape. It's very off-putting, you expect everyone to have different glasses and stick to their own style but you can't really take the piss out of someone's glasses.
>>468132 Stop trying to gaslight us. It's a hunk of plastic hanging off the side and it absolutely will touch your face by merit of being connected with only short bit of plastic.
My personal hell with them is when you drink a small juice bottle and there's a pool of juice that sticks in the cap that you have to either lick out or risk dripping down your shirt.
>>468143 As a dickhead millennial I reckon I'd give it a go. The one advantage they seem to have is there's a lot more direction in life that you didn't really get in the 00s and the world is in some ways more straightforward, imagine studying nuclear engineering or one of those other high-skill fields and just having your career handed to you.
Imagine not having to leave school in the financial crisis or getting to spend a couple years bunking off school while we all had to work or claim bennies.
My hands still smell of diesel. I was at a service station earlier wanting to get my usual premium, and somebody must have let the diesel nozzle gush over the handles of the other nozzles.
How do you even do that if you're halfway adept at pumping fuel. I'd hate to see that person have a wee.
>As a dickhead millennial I reckon I'd give it a go.
You're not far off. Everything was more straightforward. Although it was already starting to come apart. I was at uni in the mid to late 90s (starting a bit late at age 21), and I remember a professor digressing during one of the economics lectures one day, and telling us that work as such and the job market would look very different in the future. That we, and those coming after us, would have to be prepared to spend years just going from one project and one employer to the next, and that everything would be of a more intermittent and less continuous nature. I'm not sure all of us completely understood back then what he was on about, but I think about it often, because his predictions have largely come true. For 1995, those predictions were still a bit daring, looking back.
My dad was an engineer and he was of the generation where you left uni to work for one company, and had few other jobs, if any, until you'd retire. At some point, he was let go when the company was struggling, after being with them for 20 years, and he was completely devastated. He never talked much about it, but I think morally, he was grappling with it for many years. It wasn't just the fact that he was nearing his mid-40s, which was a difficult age to start over even back then. But that after 20 years of loyalty to his company, they just laid him off. I'm not sure anybody has any expectation today that they'll be with an employer for 20 years. Even five years seems a lot now.
I've got something like 15 to 20 years until I'll retire, it's kind of largely up to me because I'm self employed. Age 70 would be my absolute cutoff. Either way, I'm doing alright. At this point, I see work as a way to top up my retirement budget. I no longer think about work in terms of career opportunities and how to climb ladders. At age 50, I just need to keep my level for another 20 years, keep clients coming in, and keep being all around sensible with my money. And I very definitely don't think I'd want to have to start my working life today, just out of uni. It's all far more fragmented, and indeed infinitely less straightforward than even when I got my first job.
It'll be that time again before you know it. This year barely feels like it happened. I sense this will be a recurring theme in my life as I cross into middle age. Blink and I'll be in the hospice.
>I sense this will be a recurring theme in my life as I cross into middle age. Blink and I'll be in the hospice.
Time does speed up as you age. I'm 50 now and I don't have a clue how the fuck I got here.
I remember being told the same thing when I was 17 and a friend of my parents, who was in his early 50s, told me that at his age, it was like, Santa Claus was just here, how come he's back already. And I can see that now.
I guess the upside is that when you become old and frail and that sucks all the joy out of your life, then at least it won't last long. Ten years in a home will probably feel like five to you.
Why do women announce they're women when they're asking a question online where it's completely irrelevant, e.g 26F can anyone tell me which trains to catch if I want to go from York to Hastings?
With winter solstice behind us, it's getting time to germinate next year's Tabasco-type chillies.
C. frutescens takes much longer to ripen, and I often don't harvest the bulk of them until October or November when they are overripe, as they are then easier to dry and will keep longer. SHU estimates vary, but they're probably around 50,000 to 60,000.
I forgot about PotY this year. Have neglected to make screencaps and nothing comes to mind.
>>468249 I think it's some women, as opposed to the general catch all women. Perhaps it's more relevant to a certain type of woman who feels unsafe in public, thus a subtle way of asking advice from people who know some of what it might entail to be a woman of a specific age doing the thing. Is it any less irrelevant to ask what it'd be like travelling the middle east as a woman* than it is from youk to hastings via train? Degree of risk, of course, but they're essentially the same question.
I get that you're saying "women, huh? This stupid bitches" but you know, people are just people.
The baked beans are harder to justify but I'd risk the assumption that it happens far less often and more easily dismissed than suggested.
*I hear it's pretty fucking dangerous if you value your life and virtue.
>>468253 How much produce do you tend to get for your work? Last I remember you were making sweet chilli sauces.
I recently spoke with a Ukranian who commented that English gardens are used for pleasure whereas Ukranian gardens are worked, and wondered just how much you'd have to grow to feed yourself throughout the year.
> Perhaps it's more relevant to a certain type of woman who feels unsafe in public
Which many women do.
Although in the UK, if you look at actual crime numbers, women are relatively safe. There isn't a wrongun lurking behind every corner of every tube station. It's probably different in some war-torn Mideastern shitehole. Wouldn't go there as a man, either.
Don't even bother ladm8. The thing about WhiteKnightLad is that the construct he has built his own entire concept of masculinity around is that women really are helpless and vulnerable compared a man's natural overwhelming and disproportionately superior muscularity, aggression and sexual lust. He's not actually bothered about you questioning women and their behaviours, or the fisherperson orthodoxy, it's that in doing so, you are threatening his self-image as a man.
It's like the thing with kinks. Every male fisherperson is a raging whale poacher inside, because you have to be, otherwise it makes no sense. And believe me, I don't like being so accurately incisive in my observations about these matters, I just am.
>>468272 I always use my own personal nicely offensive analogy to understand women's experiences: imagine if you knew a load of gay bodybuilders in sailor uniforms. They're all much bigger and stronger than you, and you don't want to have sex with them, but it's always at the back of your mind that if they wanted to bum you, they could theoretically force you into it or rather force it into you, heyoooooh. There's no reason to assume they're all going to chase you around every day, playing the Blue Oyster music from Police Academy, but you'll never feel safe in a world full of big gay sailors, because even if they never even look at you, you know that a big gay bumming could happen at any time. Once you know a couple of friends who have already been bummed, at the YMCA, at the steel mill, in the sauna at your local gym, you're never going to feel safe. It doesn't matter how safe you might actually be, because our brains don't work like that.
A good 95 percent of men have their urges under control at least enough to ensure that even if they are vividly imagining giving a lass who casually walks past them on the bus an absolute pounding, they won't act on it. It's not a matter of "it could happen anytime". It doesn't, and won't. And she won't know any friends either who have been pounded in passing on a bus. Or even had their bum felt up inappropriately. We're inundated with the trope of rape and sexual harassment being everywhere. It happens, but it isn't everywhere.
What actually is offensive about your analogy is that some of it is in the same vein as the fishperson mantra that all men are potential rapists. That's just horseshite, and always has been. Some men rape. Very unfortunately. But a good 99 percent of all men will never even think about it. They are no more a potential rapist than a car driver is a potential murderer who could run people over deliberately with their car.
Ah so you're actually a homophobic repressed bumder as well as a secret woman hater. Brilliant. Seriously, is it not obvious to you?
"Oh no, please don't force that big meaty cock into my poor tight bumhole mister big strong masculine manly man! That would be so ho... I mean bad! Just terrible! And it's a constant threat, oh fuck I'm gonna cuuum..."
Is it still weekday? It feels like one since I'm on-call. No, I'm not a medic, I just do computers and people occasionally use them in the wrong way.
It should be a weekend thread, but the fucking pager went off (x00, reason xx00), can I just be /A/ and not do this?
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No. 468283Anonymous 28th December 2024 Saturday 10:44 am468283You're gonna wanna avoid that cuz it's where all the crime statistics happe
>>468267 >if you look at actual crime numbers, women are relatively safe
As I'm sure you're well aware, 'facts don't care about feelings'. There's probably no such thing as ghosts but people still be afraid of the dark. Neither is there a sabretoothed bad guy according to the statistics.
Incidentally I was reading recently about how the Izraelies have justified using AI to target individuals and networks with a successrate of 90%. That's great, right? Only 10% of people are mis-targetted, colateral damage. Only it's much worse than that when considering how the AI is making its decisions and what the human operators are justifying by using it.
Read about it here if you've an interest - https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
> Only 10% of people are mis-targetted, colateral damage.
It's the same with face recognition software. I think there was a trial with AI face recognition at some major railway hub in Berlin, where they put it through its paces and found that the success rate was also something like 80 or 90 percent. Which, again, isn't bad. But it does mean that out of every 100 people the software scans, ten to twenty entirely innocent citizens just going about their lives are flagged as potential threats. And then what happens to them, once a system like that is put in daily use? Do those people get snatched off the escalator and shoved in a back room to be interrogated by counterunabumming specialists?
What we should really be worried about is unmanned drones, or any other autonomous weapons system being equipped with AI to make its own decisions of who to kill. It's one thing when a human person orders a targeted killing against a strategically important person in a conflict. And it becomes even more controversial if that decision is based on an AI's potential hallucinations. But there are already next-generation weapons systems in development that are authorised to make that decision all on their own based on AI, with no human in the loop.
>>468283 >>468285 >In order to train the artificial intelligence, it needed data in the form of a squad of Marines spending six days walking around in front of it. On the seventh day, though, it was time to put the machine to the test.
>“If any Marines could get all the way in and touch this robot without being detected, they would win. I wanted to see, game on, what would happen,” said Root in the book. And when the game began, as Root said, “Eight Marines — not a single one got detected.”
>Two Marines, according to the book, somersaulted for 300 meters to approach the sensor. Another pair hid under a cardboard box. “You could hear them giggling the whole time,” said Root in the book. One Marine stripped a fir tree and held it in front of him as he approached the sensor. In the end, while the artificial intelligence knew how to identify a person walking, that was pretty much all it knew because that was all it had been modeled to detect.
>“An algorithm is brittle, and the takeaway from this is that there will always be these edge cases,” Scharre told Task & Purpose. “The real problem for the military is that it operates in an inherently adversarial environment, and people will always have the ability to evolve.”
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marines-ai-paul-scharre/
I reckon we'll be alright as long as we have a sufficiently large percentage of the population willing to fuck around either for profit or simple monkey business.
>>468282 >It feels like one since I'm on-call. No, I'm not a medic, I just do computers
Hey, me too! In 2025, my work is changing the rules so that I barely ever have to fix anything while I'm on call, but I will be on call 24/7 instead of stopping at 11pm. This sounds bad to me, given that I had one of "the new issues" before Christmas and it turns out all our outsourcing companies are clueless and can't fix the new problems either. However, I will get paid more money and we will move from me being on call 50% of the time to just 33.333% of the time. Bicep emoji.
Now, the thing that strikes me with this is that it's all well and good in a training scenario, when you know you can fuck around consequence free and see if it works. But I would have been significantly more hesitant to try out the Solid Snake method if I knew the thing was loaded up with .50 BMG.
Bit like how I'm a dead hard combat badass in VR, and not even the Yanks can make fun of me for being a nogunz who doesn't know my charging handle from my ejection port IYKNWIM because I have loads of time in mass shooter training software Hotdogs Horsehoes Hand Grenades, I still don't reckon I'd fare better than any other average person if you threw me in a trench in Ukraine tomorrow.
>>468299 I think you're completely correct. Someone fighting WW3 probably isn't going to shuffle around in a cardboard box, or hold some twigs in front of their face while crossing dead ground. Not least because there might be a rather more incredulous meat-based soldier looking at you as well as the AI system. However, if the AI system can't fathom these near-transparent guises a handful of jarheads tried mostly for a laugh, it probably won't be able to outwit an enemy combatant who's willing to belly crawl through a stream for an hour in order to get the drop on someone. As such it's probably better giving the flesh-warrior one of those Predator-tier night-vision-cum-thermal-imaging goggles they have now. Assuming that's the binary choice you have to make.
However, while a changing environment like an active battlefield isn't a use case for this kind of thing, maybe static or larger objects are. Whether that's a tank or a whole building, if you could get one-hundred autonomous drones and programme them to blow up anything they find that looks like that, you might have something. Mind you, that makes me think of Soviet "anti-tank dogs", especially if you've got a conflict like the Russo-Ukraine war where everyone's using very similar T-model tanks. Even best case scenario it's still a big "maybe", and it's probably going to be cheaper, easier and more effective to get your nation's biggest flight sim nerds to pilot the UAVs for a long, long time yet.
The Ukrainians and Russians are already starting to use AI-enhanced FPV drones to deal with the problem of signal jamming. A human pilot finds and marks the intended target, at which point the AI autopilot takes control. It can hunt a moving target and re-aquire the target even if it's temporarily obscured by terrain. It doesn't matter if the target is carrying a jammer, because the drone is operating fully autonomously. I don't have the link to hand, but you can buy a kit with the camera and flight controller on AliExpress for about £200.
>>468299 I suppose it depends on your overall confidence but determined people are pretty good at exploiting loopholes once they're found.
But monkey business aside - nobody wants to get whacked for their race, clothing or whatever so it makes sense for us to remove those biased human controllers from the mix. At best the problem with a system like Lavender is that it doesn't follow an accuracy gradient in the superhuman and is being used by an administration with precious little care for collateral damage. Lavender itself works fine, you just need to feed it better intel and further remove the human element.
I keep finding porn of BBWs that almost look like my sister. Same glasses, similar hair and face, comparable girth and weight. They're just missing a few key markers .. it's uncanny.
Oh well, the search goes on.
How do you know that you've found a good men's hairdresser? I think I recognise that Turkish barbers have fallen out of fashion as people don't want tight cuts anymore.
>>468308 Do you ever think to yourself that you'll meet a big lass and do that for a few years but then semaglutide injections will become affordable enough that she'll lose it all so things won't get boring? You'll go from a big-lass to shagging a tetradactyl with all that loose skin. I was thinking about this today.
Anyway, either of you two done the whole Ozempic business? I'm not obese but could do with losing a stubborn couple stone. I seem able to maintain weight easy enough, it's the losing that's difficult.
>Do you ever think to yourself that you'll meet a big lass and do that for a few years but then semaglutide injections will become affordable enough that she'll lose it all
If by "think to yourself" you mean "wake up in a cold sweat panicking", then yes.
I made a concerted effort to get a lot of social media followers this past couple of weeks, I'm about to hit 6,000 and it's changed how others react to [my account] in a way I can only relate to as when you get in shape. Suddenly strangers want to interact with me, share the things I've posted (despite them being just as tedious as they ever were) and ask my opinion on things. Social proof is a powerful tool.
