The Ukranian is kind of hot, if you know him give him my insta @numberfor002

I mean aren’t numbers invented by Arabics anyway? What’s the point at ending with 9 and 10 when they could go full 9 and 11? /s

RULES FOR THEE, NOT FOR ME.

♪ You’re so pretty. ♪

♪ Oh, so pretty. ♪

♪ You are pretty and witty and GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. ♪

Dog: Yeah, you see the problem is it’s already in my mouth. If you would have asked a bit sooner, this could have turned out differen – SQUIRREL OH MY GOD SQUIRREL DID YOU SEE THAT SQUIRREL IMMA MUNCH IT

Is there an all encompassing term for xylophones and all the instruments that are “Xylophones” with X feature(s)?

In a way, I’m glad people are slowing starting to come around and pay attention to this. For years, any time I would publicly complain about Amazon customer service online, it was very common for people to be completely dismissive or even blame me. I’d hear statements like “sure Amazon sucks, but they have great customer service” and I’d think to myself, just wait until it’s your time to find out that the customer service isn’t what you think it is.

Long story short, the item came with a broken part. Should have been quick and easy to rectify (send a replacement part, send a replacement unit, or refund the purchase). The seller was completely unhelpful. Amazon customer service would not intervene and insisted that I continue fruitlessly corresponding with the vendor, even though they had an “A-to-Z” money back guarantee if something goes wrong. It literally took months of back and forth between me, the vendor, and Amazon customer service before things were finally refunded in full.

So, basically I gave them another chance and they showed that things hadn’t improved a bit.

I can’t speak to growing or shrinking in terms of number of users and I try not to bring “feels like” into this since that’s subjective. However, anecdotally speaking, I’ve been noticing signs of a down turn over the past month or two. Perhaps just a seasonal thing, perhaps due to some other cause such as the upgrade to 0.19.X.

The most telling thing to me is that I’m seeing fewer comments during my active hours. One of the ways I browse for active discussions on Lemmy is to sort by "New Comments’ and switch to the view that shows comments instead of posts. So, I do the sort/filter, view the results, looking to see if there are any interesting comments or topics.

Historically speaking, other than a weird bug that would seem to pin some slightly older posts to the top of the list, everything on the first page would be somewhere between seconds to several minutes old. It was incredibly unusual to see anything over 5 minutes old on the first page and also very unusual to see any of the same comments if I refreshed the page.

More recently though, it’s more common to see comments that are 5+ minutes old on the first page of new comments list. It’s also much more common for me to reach the bottom of the page, hit refresh, and then see some of the same comments in the list after it refreshes. And I don’t exactly speed run through this page – I check out the post titles, if it’s an interesting topic, I’ll often click through and read more in the post, sometimes I’ll even respond to comments directly, then return back to the new comments, etc.

As I mentioned, it could just be a seasonal slowdown. Perhaps the 0.19 upgrade results in a slowdown or backlog of things that show up on the new comments list, I know other things have changed like the fact that I can no longer view anything except the first page of results. Others have suggested there are fewer posts/posters, but that what gets posted “feels like” it’s higher quality, but I’d counter that with the fact that what I “feel like” is that’s not actually the case based on what I’m seeing in the new comments list.

Ow, my balls!

I’m thankful that in all my years of working in retail, I never had a gun pointed at me. Having said that, random people get so bent out of shape about the most ridiculous, inconsequential things and it can be close to impossible to predict who it’s going to be or what is going to set them off.

Based on my experiences, if a customer is being indignant even after explaining that I was helping them out, I would apologize and remove the discount or ring the order up differently (if it was in my power to do so). More often than not, they calm down after they get what they want, even if it’s to their own detriment. Granted, after calming down, a not insignificant number of these folks will realize their mistake and then they have to figure out a way to save face so they can ask for the discount to be reapplied.

This bird, guys.

There’s nothing stopping me from writing a $480 million USD check either. Cashing it, on the other hand, that’s a you problem.

What’s more likely, someone at reddit fucked up an analysis, or these ads are 14x better than Google or 31x better than FB?

What’s most likely is that you misread or misinterpreted what was stated. It says the new format outperforms other types of ads by 28%, not that they get 28% CTR.

Ya’ll listen up up here’s the story about a little guy that lives in the blue world.

Anecdotally speaking, I’ve been suspecting this was happening already with code related AI as I’ve been noticing a pretty steep decline in code quality of the code suggestions various AI tools have been providing.

Some of these tools, like GitHub’s AI product, are trained on their own code repositories. As more and more developers use AI to help generate code and especially as more novice level developers rely on AI to help learn new technologies, more of that AI generated code is getting added to the repos (in theory) that are used to train the AI. Not that all AI code is garbage, but there’s enough that is garbage in my experience, that I suspect it’s going to be a garbage in, garbage out affair sans human correction/oversight. Currently, as far as I can tell, these tools aren’t really using much in the way of good metrics to rate whether the code they are training on is quality or not, nor whether it actually even works or not.

More and more often I’m getting ungrounded output (the new term for hallucinations) when it comes to code, rather than the actual helpful and relevant stuff that had me so excited when I first started using these products. And I worry that it’s going to get worse. I hope not, of course, but it is a little concerning when the AI tools are more consistently providing useless / broken suggestions.

Quite often when I see the person who is “technically correct” getting down voted heavily there’s usually at least one of several other factors coming into play that would easily explain the down votes.

For instance they edited their comment to add something like “Edit: The down votes just prove I’m right”, they’re being uncivil or disproportionately aggressive, they’re resorting to logical fallacies and arguing around the other people instead of debating with them, or they’re just adding confrontational/controversial hot takes in a community that doesn’t embrace that type of thing.

And honestly, you can be totally factually correct 100% of the time, but still be a drain on the community or take down the quality of a sub. If mostly all you are doing is punching down on ignorant people instead of building bridges and leading them to the factually correct conclusions, then you are probably a drain on the community and discussion. If you’re basically doing nothing but feeding the trolls, then you’re also helping to undermine the quality of the sub.

While I agree that evolution would progress roughly the same way, I don’t think it would result in exactly the same people.

This implies that you think I was saying it would be the same people, but I actually said the exact same thing as you, just in different words: “it wouldn’t be the exact same people, living the exact same lives, at the exact same time as now.”

With powerful people (like kings, emperors and their courts) being different, history would be different too

For sure, but from the timescale we’re discussing, the whole of human history is literally just a tiny fraction, a blip, at the very end. And until very recently, you could even argue the vast majority of human history was almost entirely inconsequential.

Well, I don’t think time travel backwards in this manner is possible, but if it is, it would have to operate under the laws of thermodynamics which means the energy (and maybe even some of the atoms) that was “transported back in time” would represent a paradox.

The energy and/or some of the atoms in you and the time machine were already somewhere in the past when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Which presents a paradox (and this is probably not even the only paradox), so how does the universe conserve energy in that situation?

Somehow the “original” atoms and energy that became you and the machine would need to be reconciled with the duplicates that suddenly turned up.

So maybe there’s a mysterious process that obliterates energy? What would it be and how would it work? Would that be equivalent to the false vacuum that could fundamentally destroy the universe as we currently know it?

Or maybe there’s nothing to actually stop duplication of energy and atoms and it’s entirely feasible to go back in time. You take the time machine back, see some dinos from space, and you managed to otherwise not change a thing. That means in some dozens of million years, you and that machine will be sent back to exactly the same time and location again because nothing has changed. Bam, now you and that time machine are in triplicate. But, with nothing really changing, the same process will occur again and again. Does it reach a point where there’s so much duplicated energy / matter that something fundamentally different has to happen? Would all those duplicate yous and time machines coalesce into a giant cosmic object that comes crashing down to the Earth like a giant asteroid, thus killing off most dinosaurs and paving the way for human evolution? Hmmm.

I don’t believe that kind of time travel is possible. But, if it were possible, the odds of finding that exact individual (who probably didn’t actually exist) at that exact time are so minuscule that for all practical purposes, it may as well be impossible. But, if that were also possible, it did happen, and that was the only thing that happened differently, then I’m thinking the most likely outcome is that evolution would pretty much continue on the same course, probably even with humans eventually evolving.

It’s common to think of the evolutionary process in a more or less linear fashion that could theoretically be traced back to a figurative Adam and Eve, but the reality is, it’s so much more messy and convoluted than that. Evolution is a culmination of many factors such as the environmental conditions and populations that exist during a given time frame. So even if there was one specific common ancestral individual who happened to live at the exact time the dinosaurs were alive, which that individual is not a thing that existed, there would almost certainly still be a population of others of the same species living in the same conditions – so theoretically would still ultimately lead to the same evolutionary outcomes in most instances.

So, I think it’s very possible people would still exist. But, it wouldn’t be the exact same people, living the exact same lives, at the exact same time as now.

On the other hand, who is to say that the common ancestor hadn’t already produced the offspring that specifically lead to you and I being born before it was eaten? Who’s to say that individual getting scared and eaten wouldn’t have happened anyway, regardless of whether you were there or not? Who’s to say that wasn’t actually the defining moment that ultimately resulted in the evolution of people (and you and I specifically)?

I dunno, this is all getting a little too timey-wimey for me.

In the USA at least, any time you buy alcohol, tobacco, or any number of other random things that the retailer decides to flag as requiring ID, then you’ll need assistance from a cashier. Random things include razor blades, compressed air, some herbal supplements, spray paint, butane torches, or any of dozens of other items. Any time you accidentally scan something twice, you’ll need a cashier’s assistance. Any time something rings up the wrong price or any time the UPC doesn’t scan, you’ll need a cashier’s assistance. Also, if you’re buying gift cards, you may need a cashier’s assistance.

Also, different stores have different machines and different machines work better than others. Many places have ridiculously sensitive machines that freeze up if so much as a fruit fly farts on it. Some places use “AI cameras” to detect theft, which basically the algorithm for that seems to be “If (customer scanned something OR customer didn’t scan something) then (theft, so freeze and call cashier for assistance)”.

So, the frequency is highly variable. For some stores, I can usually manage to get by with almost never needing assistance. For others, it’s practically every visit.