Melllvar

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.

Parent: Say “dad”

Baby: “Dad”

Don’t leave us hanging. Who won the argument?

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.

“Not do anything useful” would be more accurate than “do nothing”. But that’s just my tl;dr.

[…] the resolution also contains many unbalanced, inaccurate, and unwise provisions the United States cannot support. This resolution does not articulate meaningful solutions for preventing hunger and malnutrition or avoiding their devastating consequences.

The United States is concerned that the concept of “food sovereignty” could justify protectionism or other restrictive import or export policies […]

We also do not accept any reading of this resolution or related documents that would suggest that States have particular extraterritorial obligations arising from any concept of a “right to food,” which we do not recognize and has no definition in international law.

https://usun.usmission.gov/explanation-of-vote-of-the-third-committee-adoption-of-the-right-to-food-resolution/

tl;dr:

1. The USA doesn’t think the resolution actually does anything useful, even if it supports the intention
2. The USA, the largest exporter of food, is concerned how the resolution might impact food exports
3. The USA doesn’t recognize the imposition of legal obligations to act outside of its own territory

But the resolution passed anyway, which is why world hunger has disappeared.

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.

…are non-US peanut butters less viscous?

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.

Dragons, giants, monsters, that sort of thing. They weren’t entirely wrong.

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.

Information superhighway

E099: PROGRAMMER IS OVERLY POLITE

Start saving for old age now. It might seem like a long way off, and you might not have much money right now to begin with, but being young and poor is way better than being old and poor.

I got a contact sugar high just from clicking that link.

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.