fiasco

The funny thing about heliocentrism is, that isn't really the modern view either. The modern view is that there are no privileged reference frames, and heliocentrism and geocentrisms are just questions of reference frame. You can construct consistent physical models from either, and for example, you'll probably use a geocentric model if you're gonna launch a satellite.

But another fun one is the so-called discovery of oxygen, which is really about what's going on with fire. Before Lavoisier, the dominant belief was that fire is the release of phlogiston. What discredited this was the discovery of materials that get heavier when burned.

As I recall, the basic differences between employee and contractor are whether the employer can dictate time, place, and manner. The problem for gig "contractors" is that they're in a much tougher spot on exercising their rights, since not many people who can afford a lawyer deliver food. And they aren't exactly in short supply, so if Uber oversteps and individual "contractors" try to push back, they'll just be fired. Which gets back to the lawyer issue.

It goes along with how they've stopped calling it a user interface and started calling it a user experience. Interface implies the computer is a tool that you use to do things, while experience implies that the things you can do are ready made according to, basically, usage scripts that were mapped out by designers and programmers.

No sane person would talk about a user's experience with a socket wrench, and that's how you know socket wrenches are still useful.

Mine is that a cellphone should be a phone first, instead of being a shitty computer first and a celllphone as a distant afterthought.

What a dumb question, you can hold your boyfriend's hand in a manual as long as he's willing to put his hand on the shifter too.

So uh... who put the house up for sale? Did the bank foreclose on the house?

Fun question, but it leads to other questions...

First, are vampires stopped at the property line, or only at the threshold of some appurtenance (e.g., a house)? After all, you're asking about real estate, and real estate is primarily concerned with land, not buildings.

This sort of matters because, are we assuming that vampire law is coincident with human law? By this I mean, if vampires were to take control of the government and abolish real estate law, would they then be able to enter any property or building, anywhere, anytime?

If vampires do observe human law, then realistically, they probably wouldn't be able to enter a leasehold without the tenant's permission. The fundamental right of tenancy is peaceful enjoyment, and in fact tenancy is a legal property right, to access the property in question and do anything, without undue burden, allowed under the terms of the lease. It would be a violation of peaceful enjoyment for a landlord to allow vampires into the unit.

The right of inspection, by the way, is explicitly carved out in real estate law. The right to let vampires into the unit is, to my knowledge, not enumerated.

Glow-in-the-dark heating elements...

Sounds like an early experiment in artificial neural networks.

It's funny to me that people use deep learning to generate code... I thought it was commonly understood that debugging code is more difficult than writing it, and throwing in randomly generated code puts you in the position of having to debug code that was written by—well, by nobody at all.

Anyway, I think the bigger risk of deep learning models controlled by large corporations is that they're more concerned with brand image than with reality. You can already see this with ChatGPT: its model calibration has been aggressively sanitized, to the point that you have to fight to get it to generate anything even remotely interesting.

It's even more perplexing than that... One version of Web 3.0 is the crypto fantasy of being nickel-and-dimed for every single little thing. There's another, older Web 3.0 concept proposed by Tim Berners-Lee called the semantic web.